An independent Chinese film produced on a modest budget of 14 million yuan ($2 million), acted entirely by nonprofessional performers, and spoken almost wholly in the Teochew (Chaoshan) dialect, Dear You went on to generate an extraordinary 1.8 billion yuan at the Chinese mainland box office. Its success, however, was followed by controversy in Singapore. Although the immediate trigger was a single newspaper commentary, the dispute soon revealed broader tensions involving cultural interpretation, conceptual rigor, national identity, and the politics of discourse. At the center of the debate lies a fundamental question: Why is a cultural work, even when it resonates with audiences through memory and emotion, so readily interpreted by some observers in the language of politics?
This question emerged sharply after Sim Tze Wei, writing in the Singaporean Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao, framed the indie film as an example of the “highest form of united front work”. Such a notion is problematic, first, because it stretches the concept’s meaning beyond its proper analytical limits. In its usual political sense, “united front work” refers to a structured mechanism with identifiable objectives, target groups, organizational planning, and strategic direction. It is not simply a synonym for cultural influence, emotional resonance, or public appeal. Once the term is applied indiscriminately to any work capable of touching Chinese-speaking audiences, it loses its explanatory precision and becomes merely a label of suspicion. A concept used so loosely can no longer support a valid argument.
The issue is not only definitional. It also concerns the method of reasoning behind such notions. A common pattern in this kind of argument is to insulate itself from disproof. If a cultural product contains explicit slogans or obvious political symbolism, it could be seen as propaganda. If it draws audiences through family bonds, local language, and historical memory, there is no trace of such a nature at all. The “propaganda” notion is a form of circular reasoning in which a political intent is presumed at the outset, and every emotional response becomes retroactive proof. Such an approach weakens serious commentary by eliminating the distinction between a demonstrated intention and an interpretive projection.
A more rigorous discussion requires a clear separation between cultural appeal and political mobilization. Cultural works move audiences through form, narrative, affect, and memory. They invite recognition, empathy, and reflection. Political mobilization, by contrast, involves concrete objectives, defined constituencies, organized channels, and action-oriented outcomes. These two spheres can intersect, but they are not identical. To collapse them into one another is to misunderstand the nature of cultural experience itself. Viewers may respond powerfully to a film because it recalls family histories, including ancestral migration, or the sound of a familiar dialect. Such reactions do not in themselves constitute evidence of political persuasion. To treat every instance of emotional resonance as a political effect is to reduce culture to strategy and to deprive audiences of interpretive agency.
Singapore’s context helps explain why this conflation arises so quickly. Singapore’s model of nation-building has long emphasized civic identity, ethnic balance, and social cohesion. Although ethnic Chinese form the majority of the population, the state has not defined the nation in civilizational or ethnocultural terms. Instead, public institutions, language policy, and national narratives have consistently encouraged citizens to locate their primary identity within the framework of the Singaporean state rather than in ancestral homelands or ethnic memory. This approach has clear historical and political logic. Yet it also means that cultural works that speak directly to the Nanyang Chinese experience, dialect heritage, and intergenerational memory may be subject to overinterpretation. The controversy surrounding the film may therefore reveal less about any inherent political design within the work than about the anxieties produced when cultural memory reenters public space in a vivid form.
A confident national framework should be capable of accommodating emotional ties to historical origin without reading them as signs of civic weakness. To feel attachment to inherited language, ancestral stories, or diasporic memory does not necessarily undermine one’s identification with the nation one inhabits
If Singapore’s national identity is as stable and self-assured as many commentators maintain, then the cultural power of one film should not be magnified into a threat to political loyalty. A confident national framework should be capable of accommodating emotional ties to historical origin without reading them as signs of civic weakness. To feel attachment to inherited language, ancestral stories, or diasporic memory does not necessarily undermine one’s identification with the nation one inhabits. On the contrary, plural identities are a normal feature of migrant and postmigrant societies. When cultural recognition is immediately translated into a matter of political risk, what is disclosed may not be the danger of the cultural object but the insecurity of the interpretive framework through which it is viewed.
The reaction from Chinese public opinion should likewise be understood in broader terms. It reflects more than defensiveness about a single film. It expresses frustration with an uneven standard in global cultural judgment. Western cultural products often travel internationally as carriers of lifestyle, values, and emotional identification without attracting the same degree of immediate political suspicion. Yet when a Chinese cultural work succeeds in winning affection beyond its borders, its effect is often treated as presumptively strategic. The implication is that China may export commodities, but not sentiment; market presence, but not cultural legitimacy. This asymmetry reveals an imbalance in discursive power, one in which Chinese cultural success remains vulnerable to prior frameworks of bigotry.
Cultural connection and political loyalty need not stand in opposition. Chinese communities in Southeast Asia have long lived within layered histories of migration, settlement, adaptation, and citizenship. They are fully capable of holding a firm national identity while also retaining meaningful ties to language, memory, and cultural inheritance. A mature public discourse should be able to recognize this complexity. If every act of cultural resonance is interpreted in political language, the result is not sharper analysis but poorer judgment.
The author is secretary-general of the Association of Greater Bay Area Professionals.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
