Singapore History

1. The Chinese population in Singapore increases tremendously from 31.0% of the total population to 72.1% between 1824 and 1901 in source A. The Chinese population gradually became the biggest proportion of the total population starting from 1836. Meanwhile only in the 1870s, the Chinese population declined. There are several reasons that contributed to this trend.

The first reason is due to the rapid economic growth in Singapore. Between 1819 and 1824, Sir Stamford Raffles signed treaties to make Singapore gradually became the Straits Settlements. Raffles, Farquhar, and Crawfurd worked to make Singapore become a free trading port. The geographical location with a splendid habour and sheltered anchorage also bring advantages to trading with other countries. Moreover, it had no governmental interference in trade (Wong, 1978). These reasons bring commercial success and prosperity to Singapore as there is more trading and capital investment. With the opening of Suez Canal, new technologies such as steamships, discoveries of rich raw materials in Malaya and construction developed for the convenience of trading further improved the city development in Singapore. Therefore, the economic success and opportunities becomes a pull factor to attract Chinese migrants to Singapore.

The second reason is that Raffles adopted a laissez-faire immigration policy to attract Chinese to migrate to Singapore (Turnbull, 2009). Meanwhile, other Western countries including America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand restricted Chinese immigrations because they feared the energetic and efficient Chinese immigrants might compete for the possession of land in the future (Ee, 1961). So they didn't have other choices and went to Singapore. Moreover, there was also a change of attitude from the Chinese Government towards emigration. The policy of prohibitions against emigration started to relax from the mid-nineteenth century. By 1860, a convention is signed which permit Chinese to emigrate...