Chinese Reading Rooms, Print Culture, and Overseas Chinese Nationalism in Colonial Singapore and Malaya

Abstract

While recent research has given deeper understanding of libraries, the print culture ofo the English-speaking residents of colonial Singapore and Malaya, the majority, non-English-speaking population, has been largely neglected. To give a more complete and nuanced understanding of the role that libraries and reading and writing cultures played in colonial Singapore and Malaya, this paper will situate the three aspects among the overseas Chinese community in pre-war Singapore and Malaya. It will demonstrate that Chinese reading rooms, along with Chinese print culture, had a major role in shaping overseas Chinese nationalism in colonial Singapore and Malaya. They were important avenues for the Kuomintang to propagate ideologies that helped fostered an imagined community: a sense of nationhood among the overseas Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, whose loyalty lay with China and not the British. This was unacceptable to the British, who responded with surveillance, suppression, and censorship to contain the threat to their rule.