Today, in "PRIME: commentary", Senior Writer Andy Ho wrote an opinion piece on "Why men should not be entitled to alimony" in response to Kanwaljit Soin's proposal (read it!) that maintenance obligations be mutual. In this opinion piece, he argues against what he calls Kanwaljit Soin's "egalitarian-sounding" proposal and mentions with implicit approval the argument that since "marriage is a covenant that progressively disadvantages the woman, fairness would indicate that [only] a divorced women must be able to accrue the unrealized gains of her marriage."

Personally, I think that not only should the obligation to pay maintenance after marriage be mutual, all obligations, especially the husband's obligation to maintain a wife during marriage, should be mutual. Marriage is, as the law requires it, a partnership of equals. Section 46 of the Women's Charter demands it explicitly:

46. --(1) Upon the solemnization of marriage, the husband and the wife shall be mutually bound to co-operate with each other in safeguarding the interests of the union and in caring and providing for the children.

(2) The husband and the wife shall have the right separately to engage in any trade or profession or in social activities.

(3) The wife shall have the right to use her own surname and name separately.

(4) The husband and the wife shall have equal rights in the running of the matrimonial household.

One of the main reasons for the enactment of the Women's Charter is to raise the status of women in Singapore back in the 1960s. As you might already have noticed, Section 46(3) provides that the wife shall "have the right to use her own surname and name separately". This assumes that the husband will not have to adopt the wife's surname. Section 47(1) provides that a married woman may have an independent domicile, with no suggestion that a married may have any dependent domicile. Section 51(a) states explicitly that married woman shall be capable of acquiring, holding and disposing of, any property.

Few today can imagine how backward we were then (must have been in antiquity), when a married woman may not even own property! As one may imagine, the status of woman in 1950s Singapore must have been truly unequal, and upon marriage, probably worsened. And the PAP government then, as part of their election campaign, had promised to right the wrongs.

As Chan Choy Siang, during the eventual enactment of the Women's Charter (in 1961) said:

"We of the PAP have suffered hardship and have tried our best to fulfil our Five-Year Plan. We introduce this Bill in order to uphold the rights of women, so that all their problems will be easily resolved. At the same time, we have tried our best to discover the inequalities of men and women in the civil service. We pay great attention to women's problems. These problems were not looked after by the previous governments."

So in the context of grave social inequalities between men and women, the Women's Charter was a noble attempt to, in every way possible, to require husbands to treat their wives as equal partners. It was okay during those days to have one-sided obligations; after all, inequality then too was one-sided (okay, maybe 99.999 percent). However, the egalitarian instincts of the Women's Charter has gone awry as socially, the status of women have progressed to a point where some obligations placed on husbands by way of the Woman's Charter in certain factual contexts are un-egalitarian instead.

The obligation for a man to maintain his wife starts during marriage.

Section 69(1) provides :

"Any married woman whose husband neglects or refuses to provide her reasonable maintenance may apply to a District Court or a Magistrate's Court and that Court may, on due proof thereof, order the husband to pay a monthly allowance or a lump sum for her maintenance."

Only in the continuation of total existing social inequalities between men and women may such a one-sided obligation make any sense. Take a very likely scenario: a handicapped (or sick) husband with a wife who earns a sufficient income to provide for his needs. It is ludicrous that in such a case, the wife will not be obliged to provide for the husband. While the intention and spirit of Section 69(1) is commendable, as it requires husbands to take care of their wives when they can afford to and when their wives are dependent on them; it becomes equally callous to then not oblige the wives to do the same in a similar situation. The expression in Section 46(1) is clear - "the husband and the wife shall be mutually bound to co-operate with each other in safeguarding the interests of the union."

And now to the one sided maintenance obligations after marriage. Well, contrary to what Andy Ho believes, the social context of marriages are not biased in favor of men. Even if it still remains so (which I really doubt), it is no longer biased in all cases. The specific examples Andy Ho gives in his prime commentary are: "Not only does a woman's sex appeal apparently wanes faster with age than a man's, she generally marries a man of the same age or older. Remarriage therefore becomes increasingly unlikely as she ages. That is not the case with men." Can that be right in each case? So therefore a woman should not be obliged to maintain a husband because her odds of getting remarried are lower? So women are therefore to be compensated for entering into marriage and are not equal actually? Such arguments are spurious at best, and cruel to individuals at worst. It demeans woman, discriminates against men, and inherent is this strange and terrible notion - that although on the day the woman enters into the marriage, she promises to be an equal partner in all things, she may one day walk away from the union, if the man she now calls husband becomes destitute, without a care in the world.

And the law as it stands does not oblige her to do any more.

*Am swamped, no time to read it twice-over, and comments (if any) are appreciated, but might not always be readily replied to. Cheers.

Presumably because NMP Siew Kum Hong was vocal about gay rights and AWARE's stress on gender rather than women's rights per se, his political adversaries shrewdly capitalised on allegations that he and Maruah accepted foreign handouts from a Swede gentleman, Johan Skarendal. Allegations to which Siew Kum Hong angrily denied and strongly objected to. His adversaries were clever enough to open that front to ignite the government's relatively justifiable paranoia, and the police report made by the NMP indicated that he knew enough of the seriousness of the allegations. The Yahoo lawyer categorically denied that he was involved in any inappropriate or illegal funding from the Swede, and by inference as Maruah members were there as well, Maruah was also not implicated in dubious funding, closing the case.

The government's fear of foreign funding of local politicians and activists is not unique. The UK has the Political Parties, Elections and Referendum Act forcing all parties to be transparent about their donations and outlawed foreign funding. The reasons were to prevent corruption and mitigate public cynicism related to the integrity of political parties and donor influence over politicians. However, other countries are even wary of their NGOs accepting foreign donations. Turkey and Russia are such examples. To be fair and understanding the realist realities of the world, the anxiety over the hidden agenda of foreign donations to political parties and NGOs are not unfounded.

Some foreign public and private philanthropies are designed as catalysts of political change in supposedly less democratic states. The objective of funding is to spur on "democracy" and the US' National Endowment for Democracy, which Dr Chee Soon Juan was a fellow in 2004, is a common example of missionary democracy and the need to convert "ignorant heathens" for their own good. However, at the other extreme, sounding the nationalistic klaxon, less progressive governments typically raise the ghoul of foreign intervention as an excuse to choke and isolate local politicians and activists within their borders. Perhaps the tentative balance is that politicians cannot accept any kind of foreign funding while activists can accept foreign funding as long as it is not directly or indirectly engineered by a foreign government. Perhaps.

Regardless if the recent Swede's visit was an innocuous one or not, it paved the way for further questions on what foreign donations political parties and activists can accept without detonating ethical and legal powder kegs. Who else besides Siew Kum Hong and some Maruah activists did Johan Skarendal meet as part of his Singapore itinerary is not public information. Arguably in the interest of the development of a civil society without a paranoid government taking every chance to jump at shadows and curb the honest work of activists, hopefully other parties that met the Swede are not naive and also followed Maruah's example of financial integrity and independence.

In the aftermath of mishaps, there's always the question of responsibility. On that subject, I heard an interesting proverb from my grandma some time ago and have been trying to look it up. The closest I could find was on Zaobao:

福建话有一句俚语"鸡仔不合，半天打老鹰。" 指小鸡们不合群、不听放，结果有一只被老鹰叨走了，急得母鸡张开翅膀，追打老鹰。这是比喻自家的孩子不听话，还要去责怪他人。

[My attempt at translation] In Hokkien, there is a proverb: "If chicks are not united, the eagles in the sky get attacked" which means the chicks don't stay together, don't listen (what?), in the end when one gets taken away by an eagle, the anxious mother hen extends her wings, chasing after the eagle. This alludes to cases when one's own children do not behave, the parents try to find someone else to blame.

For a start, what I heard was somewhat different: "鸡仔勿盖，半天打老鹰。" [kua kiah mia kam, puah ti pah lao yoh] Roughly translated, it means: (The farmer) doesn't cover up his chicks and then goes on a hunting spree for eagles (when one gets taken away by an eagle).

This makes a lot more sense than the Zaobao version; the latter suffers from two problems - Are chicks united in a group able to stand up to an eagle? And since when are hens able to attack eagles?

Both versions attack the tendency to blame someone else when the responsibility lies firmly at home. But while the former is an entreaty and exhortation for unity and obedience to parental/governmental authority, the latter version emphasizes personal responsibility in taking appropriate, common sense precautions such as putting bars in toilet windows of detention facilities or doing 'world class' due diligence before investing in potentially non-world class companies.

MM's Principal Private Secretary Chee Hong Tat has taken a lot flak, some of it unwarranted, but c'est la vie - empathy and sympathy are often in short supply, even for a messenger carrying a message from Upstairs, when the very fierce S word is used. I'm not in favour of the state (that is my taxes) paying for dialect education in the public school system but I also think that urging families not to speak dialects at home was a serious mistake if only because of how it exacerbated the (communication) gap between grandparents and grandchildren.

On a more practical note, for those of us who deal with overseas Chinese in the course of work, do business or even research fieldwork in the Pacific Asia region, the ability to speak dialects is always an advantage.

The gahmen also discourages dialects at home based on the claim that it impedes the learning of Mandarin (i.e. the Beijing dialect). Since most of the Malaysians I know speak decent English, Bahasa, Chinese, Cantonese and Hokkien, I find this claim somewhat doubtful. And since the dialects are related to Chinese aka Mandarin aka putonghua aka guoyu, they might actually have positive feedback loops like those enjoyed by those learning related languages, like Spanish and Portuguese.

So what am I actually going to do about it? For a start, as the individual level, I hope to be able to have simple conversations with my grandma without the need for my relatives as interpreters.

A key word I hear a lot is mai. It means don't, usually implying don't want. In Chinese characters, it is often rendered as 不要 but my uncle tells me that it should be written as 勿愛 though only 勿 appears when it is compounded in phrases like mai gei (勿假 :: don't bluff), mai hiam buay pai (勿嫌袂歹 :: if not picky, it's ok), mai siao siao (勿痟痟 :: don't be crazy), mai sng sng (勿耍耍 or 玩玩 :: don't play around). [Helpful corroboration on this Malaysian forum thread for the Chinese characters added to the TalkingCock dictionary content.]

I've got nothing against the current Speak Mandarin Campaign but wrt the perpetual Don't Speak Dialect Campaign, my response is mai guan ii (勿管他 :: don't pay any attention to them).

Dr Bryan Caplan, in a forthcoming piece for Ethos (journal produced by the Singapore Civil Service College; this post is based on the version posted in his blog entry) presents the two puzzles about Singapore's political economy. First, despite unpopular economic policies the PAP has still been continuously re-elected; second, despite having Westminster-style democracy Singapore remains a one-party state.

The paper then explores three families of explanations (His assessments in brackets):

1. Singapore is not really a democracy (Wrong)
2. Singapore's voters are unusually economically literate. (Dubious)
3. Singapore's voters are unusually loyal, deferential, and/or resigned. (Fits Facts Well)

However the puzzles presented have been already tackled by other scholars. To cite the influential ones, Chua Beng Huat (Communitarian Ideology and Democracy, 1995), Paul Trocki (Wealth, Power and the Culture of Control, 2006), Yao Souchou (The State and the Culture of Excess, 2007). If we use the combination of Chua, Trocki and Yao, and these are full-length books with well-researched evidence, then we would have already arrived at 1: wrong, 2: dubious, but 3 would be wrong too. They show instead that Singapore's voters are consciously and rationally making a calculated choice to prefer economic growth over political liberalization. And there is choice; voters have thus repeatedly rejected Chee's SDP which emphasizes political liberalization and privatization and preferred Chiam's SPP and Low's WP because they emphasize greater redistribution of growth.

My main critique of Caplan's paper and his interpretation of the facts ("World Values Survey" results) is that it evaluates the Singapore voter with the yardstick of the contemporary Anglo-American voter. This comparison is simply untenable since Singapore is historically, culturally, geographically, etc., different. In any case, the Whigs ruled semi-democratic Britain (no full suffrage and lots of autocracy) as a one-party state from 1721 to 1770 (with one year of Tory rule in between). The Tories who took over in 1770 to 1782 didn't do much for democracy either, and lost the American colonies as a result, and a lot more can be said about the 1800s and that century of empire, industrialization (and class conflict) and liberalization in Britain.

So really, anchoring the puzzle in so-called Westminster-style democracy is both ahistorical and ethnocentric. After all, we did not inherit a Westminster parliament, but a colonial version of it. Our founding fathers, and here I mean the whole gamut from David Marshall to Lee Kuan Yew to Lim Chin Siong, fought the British and each other for democratic, constitutional, republican government, and the outcome of this politics of decolonization is quite unique. Interestingly, the British, when they first colonized this region, thought the natives, i.e. "Malays", were "unusually loyal, deferential, and/or resigned" to their autocratic political leaders, or in their words, apathetic and fatalistic to their despotic rajas (see Frank Swettenham's "The Real Malay").

In conclusion, Caplan could have reviewed the existing literature more thoroughly as well as taken more cognizance of Singapore's cultural and social-historical context and processes.