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Singapore. A cacophony of Mandarin and English echo through the streets of Singapore’s Chinatown as crowds of shoppers buy joss sticks and fruit as offerings to the spirits during the Seventh Month Ghost Festival.

English has long united the ethnically diverse island-state, but Singapore’s leaders now foresee a time when Mandarin will be the nation’s dominant language and they are encouraging their people to become fluent in Chinese.

“Both English and Mandarin are important because in different situations you use either language,” Chinatown shopkeeper Eng Yee Lay said. “But Mandarin has become more important.”

Ties with China have taken on a strategic imperative in Singapore, which seeks to leverage the bilingual skills of its ethnic Chinese majority to get a larger slice of China’s expanding economy.

“With the growing importance of China on the world stage, Chinese Singaporeans who are competent in the language and familiar with the culture would have a distinct advantage when working and interacting with Chinese nationals,” said Lim Sau Hoong, chairwoman of the Promote Mandarin Council.

The government-sponsored campaign to champion Mandarin began in 1979, to linguistically unite Singapore’s disparate Chinese communities, which spoke a range of dialects passed on by ancestors who came from China in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Unifying the Chinese majority in a nation with sizeable Malay and Indian minorities was a priority and in the early days, the Speak Mandarin Campaign discouraged ethnic Chinese from speaking dialects such as Hokkien.

Now, with a majority of Singaporeans speaking Mandarin in their homes, according to government figures, the focus is on improving fluency in spoken and written Mandarin.

“In two generations, Mandarin will become our mother tongue,” said Singapore’s first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, at the launch of the 2009 Speak Mandarin Campaign this year.

His vision is for Singapore to become China’s Southeast Asia hub as it expands its commercial interests in the region. Singapore companies, meanwhile, will be able to entrench their positions in China, giving them an advantage over other foreign companies.

Already, despite its small size, Singapore is China’s third-largest foreign investor, with total foreign direct investment of 6.5 billion Singapore dollars ($4.6 billion) in 2008, a 40 percent rise from 2007, according to the Chinese government. Bilateral trade is up 17-fold since 1991, to 91.4 billion Singapore dollars in 2008.

Singapore has come a long way since the 1970s, when Cambridge-educated Lee was suspicious of Maoist China’s designs on the region and mainly promoted English and aligned with anti-Communist countries.

As Singapore prepares to mark two decades of ties with China next year, 20,000 Singaporeans are working in China and scores of joint ventures are in the works.

Among them is the construction of an “eco-city” in Tianjin, near Beijing, which is being designed to use renewable energy, recycled water and has an extensive public transport system.

Singapore’s senior cabinet minister and the head of its Monetary Authority, Goh Chok Tong, discussed the project with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao in a visit to China last week.

Among Singapore investors in China are offshore oil-rig builder Keppel, DBS Bank, water-treatment specialist Hyflux, energy-services provider Rotary Engineering and Raffles Education.

Singapore developer CapitaLand, which aims to build 58 malls in 40 Chinese cities, said this month that it planned to nearly double the value of its assets in China to $8 billion, or 45 percent of its overall assets.

Singapore is proving to be a fertile recruiting ground for Mandarin-speaking middle and senior managers to run the operations of multinationals in China, where a lack of qualified managers has held back expansion plans by many foreign companies.

The financial crisis took a toll on Singapore’s export-dependent economy, reducing annual economic growth to 1.1 percent in 2008, versus 8.2 percent between 2004 and 2007, and creating the highest unemployment rate in five years. Strengthening ties with China is seen as mitigating Singapore’s risk.

China is expected to become Singapore’s largest single market for nonoil exports this year, overtaking the United States, said economist Irvin Seah at Singapore’s top bank DBS Group.

Singaporeans were among the first foreign investors in China after Deng Xiaoping adopted a market economy in 1978. After Deng’s 1992 call to “learn from the world and, especially Singapore, and do better than Singapore,” thousands of Chinese officials started flooding the city-state for trips and university degree programs in administration.

About three-quarters of Singapore’s population are ethnic Chinese, giving its businessmen a cultural advantage versus the West, but the government is trying to strengthen understanding of Chinese culture and thinking.

“Although we speak the same language, when we look at issues we are different,” said IE Singapore chief executive Chong Lit Cheong, whose state agency promotes Singapore investments.

Singaporean Eugene Aw, 22, sees his future in China.

“I realized that Asia wouldn’t wait for me. For now I intend to stay local in Singapore to gain exposure,” he said. “And then if I can, I will spring into China.”



Reuters