Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is one of the most important overseas educational institutions that provides professional public administration training for senior Chinese public officials. Since 2012, the landscape of overseas professional public administration training has been drastically changed by the new administration of Chinese President Xi Jinping. It is therefore an opportune moment to reflect on NTU’s experience and prepare for the new changes. In this article, the authors share insights from their teaching experience, personal observations and interviews at NTU in the past decade since the Executive Master of Public Administration (EMPA) programme was first introduced, and discuss the challenges encountered in teaching Chinese senior public officials. This article also examines the development of professional public administration training in China, and makes recommendations for future research.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0023830920925510

Past research on Singapore English (SgE) has shown that there are specific segmental and prosodic patterns that are unique to the three major ethnic groups, Chinese, Malay, and Indian in Singapore. These features have been highlighted as the “stereotypical” ethnic markers of SgE speakers, assuming substrate influence from the speakers’ “ethnic” languages (Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil). However, recent research suggests that Singaporeans are becoming increasingly English dominant and has challenged the position of the ethnic languages as true “mother tongues” of Singaporeans. Hence, this study seeks to question if such “stereotypical” ethnic features exist, and if so, the extent to which a less dominant ethnic language would affect the phonology of speakers’ English. This study looks specifically at the production of consonants /f/, /θ/, /t/, /v/, and /w/ as salient segmental features in SgE. Participants’ phonetic behavior of /θ/, which was produced similarly across the three ethnic groups, disputed substrate influence. Tamil speakers were the most disparate, particularly with the /v/-/w/ contrast production. However, these deviations were often sporadic phonetic changes, which scarcely reflect robust speech patterns in the community. As a result, consonantal production in SgE is found to be largely independent of substrate influence and relatively uniform across the three ethnicities. The homogeneity observed in this study sheds light on bilinguals’ acquisition of sounds, and it also provides phonological evidence toward the understanding of the evolutionary process of postcolonial Englishes.

This paper suggests an explicatory model for language policy reform (or lack thereof) at the level of the state. This is accomplished by assessing the value of the ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model of public policy analysis (Howlett and Migone, Policy and Society 30(1):53–62, 2011), which I argue can be strengthened by a genealogical approach (Foucault, Social Science Information 10(2):7–30, 1971). Singapore’s Mother Tongue (MT) policy is used as a case for illustration. There is a consensus amongst local linguists (e.g. Tan, World Englishes 33(3):319–339, 2014; Wee, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 35(5):649–660, 2014) that the current MT policy of assigning an official MT based on one’s race is essentialist and untenable in light of language shift toward English and increasing diversity through immigration. Using the model, the MT policy is argued to be part of a larger system of policies that maintain a particular understanding of racial equality through a unique brand of multiracialism. The pressures of increasing immigration and diversity are insufficient as exogenous shocks that might lead to changes to the MT policy. Instead, partisan interests in maintaining this brand of multiracialism serves to entrench existing ethnolinguistic policy positions, contributing to inertia in language policy reform.