Babyless future for local chinese>?
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SINGAPORE—Sarah Wee and James Ng are the quintessential career couple. Married only a year, the sparkly Wee is a media executive at a large ad agency. Ng, clean-cut in a blue button-down, is an asset manager with a property investment firm. They own a condo, a $42,000 car and two dogs, a Maltese and a Shih Tzu. They have a bright future, a future that includes children—but not just yet. That is the quandary Singapore faces as it tries to boost its anemic birthrate. The government, fearing that the tiny, prosperous city-state will shrink into oblivion, has recently adopted a series of incentives to encourage people to have not just one or two but three or more children. Officialdom here once rewarded parents who voluntarily sterilized themselves. Now it’s offering three-month paid maternity leaves, up to several thousand dollars in graduated baby bonuses and co-savings plans, and tax breaks for nannies and grandparents who take care of children. Those incentives may nudge couples such as Wee and Ng. Wee, 28, had been thinking of having one or two babies. But with the new policy, she said, maybe she will have more. “It seems a bit easier to have children,� she said over dinner at a restaurant in a glittering downtown shopping mall. But, she added, “I don’t want to quit my job and stay at home.� Singapore’s birthrate has sunk to an all-time low of 1.25 babies per woman. Raising it has become a national cause, as significant as the fight against terrorism. If the birthrate continues to wane, officials warn, the workforce will shrink. There will be fewer people to support a growing elderly population and to sustain the military that protects this 400-square-mile island sandwiched between Indonesia and Malaysia. Singapore’s vaunted tiger economy will whimper. The government is loosening immigration rules, too. But a premium will always be placed on native-born Singaporean citizens, officials said. “This is a matter of values, not of incentives,� the new prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, said in a recent National Day speech. “We want people to have babies because you want them and you love them. It’s part of a happy family life. “ “Singapore. A Great Place for Families,� declared a two-page color spread in the Straits Times newspaper promoting the baby perks. The paper also brimmed with articles about new measures to encourage a “balanced family life,� including a shorter workweek for government employees—five days instead of five and a half—and guidelines for ending discrimination against working women who want babies.
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Maybe SG with her secular outlook with no sense of national indentity is following the way of europe, but the red dot will not be miss much though for there's no sense of belonging and heritage to begin with
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If Singapore collapses, it can always merge back with Malaysia in a PRC-HK style relationship.
No problem as long as KL doesn't interfere in local affairs.
Singapore identity is not that old also, only created in the 1960s. Some older Singaporeans still consider Singapore and Malaya to be one family.
Just a switch of propaganda can do the trick.
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1st they ask us to switch to non-branded bread b'coz they think that we are poor and are wasting money. Then they ask us to have more babies, even suggesting that we should work less. So does work less = less $$ but yet having to spend more, coz baby = more $$ spend.
Even pri kid know that equation dun compute.
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its not so simple as changing a couple of policies and giving incentives
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... they are always coming up short in their God Damned policies, & we're like farking Guinea Pigs...
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“This is a matter of values, not of incentives,” the new prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, said in a recent National Day speech. “We want people to have babies because you want them and you love them. It’s part of a happy family life. “
Is serving the country a matter of values, not of incentives?
