The Eng-Lite Program Lecture Series: Talk No 4
Time：2024.02.20（Tue.）10:30-12:30
Topic：The Significance of Post-World War II Cable Radio Network Rediffusion Singapore's Dialect Program to the Sinophone Community
Speaker：E.K. Tan, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of English with Joint-Appointment in Asian and Asian American Studies, Stony Brook University
Host：Wen-Hsun Chang, Associate Professor and Institute Director, Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature, National Taiwan University
Venue: Online
By Conrad C. Carl
On February 20, 2024, the Eng-Lite Program Lecture Series continued with yet another fascinating talk. We were delighted to welcome Professor E.K. Tan to give a presentation that dove deep into the politics of language(s) of the Sinophone community in Singapore and explored the role audiovisual media played during that time.
E.K. Tan is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies in the Department of English, Asian and Asian American Studies at Stony Brook University. Professor Tan’s research interest centers around Sinophone communities in Southeast Asia and the theoretical lenses employed—among many others—range from cultural studies to cultural translations and postcolonial theory.
Rediffusion—the focal point of this talk—was a company founded in England in 1928 that offered cable radio programs. In 1949, a young engineer named Jack Snowden introduced Rediffusion to Singapore. For him, Rediffusion differed from the official government radio station in the sense that it was a commercial product and, thus, would cater to the entertainment needs of customers, especially the generation population in Singapore. In addition to Tamil, Malay and English programs, Rediffusion also provided a channel solely for Chinese listeners. This cable network not only included Mandarin programs but also programs in various dialects such as Hokkien, Cantonese, and even Teochew.
Despite being an entertainment radio network, Rediffusion stressed its service as providing its listeners with that three specific focuses: news, education and entertainment. The significance of Rediffusion cannot be overstated, Professor Tan pointed out. Shortly after its launch, Rediffusion became an indispensable medium in the general media landscape of Singapore, witnessing and recording Singapore’s road to independence, nation building and decolonization. That being said, Professor Tan elucidated that Rediffusion suffered setbacks in terms of its subscription numbers after serving the Singapore audience for more than three decades. There are two main factors for this. Firstly, with television gradually becoming a more widespread medium, the support and need for radio broadcasts plummeted. In the 1960s, many citizens pivoted towards the newly created Radio Television Singapore (later renamed to Singapore Broadcasting Corporation, SBC) because the state radio station was free. Secondly, to the detriment of all the diverse dialects present at the time in Singapore, its government adopted a policy that promoted Mandarin as the default mother for all ethnic Chinese Singapore. In other words, programs in dialects were limited and Rediffusion was particularly targeted with guidelines (or rather “recommendations” as the government called it), specifying the kind of broadcasts they were supposed to do. And indeed, Professor Tan expounded that although Rediffusion kept some successful dialect programs, they did increase their Mandarin broadcasts from the early 1980s onwards. This was also motivated by Lee Kuan Yew—the first Prime Minister of Singapore—who emphasized that during times of uncertainty and for a young country that had just recently gained independence, foregrounding the common (i.e. Mandarin) rather than the particular (i.e. dialects) was pivotal. He believed that learning and focusing on Mandarin would lessen the burden of students as the mastery of Mandarin alongside English would make them competitive in the future as they pursue careers involving economic and political connections to China that was opening it door to global trade. Interestingly enough and to the surprise of Snowden, Rediffusion initial increase in Mandarin programs led to a soaring subscription number and, hence, dispelled Snowden’s misgivings about the government’s plans to put greater emphasis on Mandarin instead of the dialects. After all, increasing the revenue through this new market is of utmost importance for a private business. In short, Rediffusion had to deal with two challenges with the introduction of the “Speak More Mandarin, Less Dialect” policy: the governmental guidelines and the needs and demands of its listeners. Only by dealing with both, could Rediffusion continue to operate.
Furthermore, Professor Tan drew our attention to another issue that contributed to the eventual downfall of Rediffusion. In the rapidly changing media- and ethnoscape of Singapore’s society, competition and disputes over copied or even plagiarized programs with SBC were unavoidable, putting another strain on Rediffusion’s present and future prospects. In the early 1970s, the Singaporean government implemented a policy to modernize its public housing and founded the Housing and Development Board (HDB). This was fateful for Rediffusion, as Professor Tan was about to illustrate. The plan required many households to leave the countryside behind and move to designated and newly built communities. The laying of electric cables was laborious, expensive, and time-consuming. Rediffusion’s inability to upgrade its programs to offer uninterrupted service to those living in HDB led to Rediffusion’s major loss in the number of listeners.
The diversity of dialects, Professor Tan summed up, that shaped the Sinophone community in Singapore and was initially supported and acknowledged by Rediffusion’s various dialect programs, suffered heavily under the promotion of the Speak Mandarin Campaign. In the wake of Singapore’s independence and the declaration of Mandarin as one of the four official languages, Chinese dialects, despite their affective connections to the diverse ethnic Chinese communities in Singapore, were univocally suppressed by a state language policy that privileged Mandarin as an official language and as the mother tongue of all ethnic Chinese. Because Rediffusion was pivotal in the creation of the self-image of the Sinophone community in Singapore, although it has disappeared from the Singapore households, in the memories of the older generation, it continues to live on as something that shaped and witnessed a significant period of Singapore’s history.
In the Q&A afterwards, Professor Tan was given more time to dig deeper into some of the practical aspects of Rediffusion and the installation of said device. Links to Taiwan’s radio broadcasting past were drawn but differences, specifically in terms of the limited amounts of dialects that were catered to, were clearly highlighted as well, after all, the sociohistorical conditions did differ in significant ways. Aside from that, actual contents of the broadcasts and the potential role of advertisement were subjects of discussion, too. Professor Tan ended the Q&A with an appeal, urging students to pursue projects in radio, this under-researched field by studying this media form in relation to the changing mediascapes over more than half a century. In today’s age of podcasts, livestreams and other everchanging media forms, we need to be constantly aware of how these newer media forms continue to shape how we understand the world we live in to better understand our relationship to it. After this talk, we were able to greatly deepen our knowledge about Singapore and it’s Sinophone community. For this, we wish to extend our gratitude and appreciation to Professor E.K. Tan!
