ABSTRACT
The society in Asia which is in many ways the clearest exemplar of the preoccupations is Singapore: the one state in Southeast Asia with a substantial Chinese majority, the one in which identity anxiety seems to be most keenly felt. But also the one that at its origin as an independent state in 1965 committed itself to a model of perpetual multiracialism, a model from which it is in some significant ways retreating. This chapter argues that the phenomenon of resinification is best approached through the exploration of a group of social policies involving population, education, the creation of ideology and the refurbishment of Confucianism and which collectively but hiddenly focuses on the re-establishment of patriarchy. Chinese students who form the bulk of the school population were taught not Buddhism, the religion to which, mostly in its Mahayana form and substantially mixed with elements of Chinese “folk” religion they or their parents adhere, but rather Confucianism.
