A growing body of literature has assessed the distributional effects of glo¬balisation, focusing mainly on inequality by skill level or socio-economic characteristics. Much less is known about the differential effects for men and women, although theory suggests several channels through which trade may affect the employment of men versus women. Globally, gender gaps in labour market outcomes remain large, notwithstanding the fact that differences between men and women in labour force participation and earnings are declining in many countries. Indonesia is one of the countries with relatively low female labour force participation, and a persistently large gender gap in participation. To understand whether and how trade policy and trade performance have played a role in this gender gap, this chapter focuses on the gender-specific effects of trade liberalisation in the 1990s and the relationships between trade and female employment in the period 2000–10.

In the next section, we first consider trade theory, and the mechanisms through which trade reform can induce gendered labour market effects. These channels include labour market discrimination, skill-biased techno¬logical change, sectoral segregation and the sectoral structure of employ¬ment. We then discuss the international empirical evidence for gendered trade effects. In the second section, we discuss the effects of Indonesia's trade reforms in the 1990s. The evidence suggests that import tariff reduc¬tions improved the competitiveness of Indonesian firms by reducing the costs of intermediate inputs. This, in turn, induced job creation and increased female—but not male—work participation. In the third section, we describe the more recent trends in female labour force participation, and in the fourth we relate those trends to Indonesia's trade performance in the period 2000–10. While the 1990s were a period of stagnation in aggregate female labour force participation, in the post-decentralisation period Indonesia experienced an increase in female participation, mainly in the service and trade sectors. But at the same time, the role of international trade in improving employment opportunities for women seems to have declined between 2000 and 2010.

Countries in the Nanyang have always been conscious of China, more so when it is united and prosperous and less so when it is weak and divided. As more people study modern China's foreign relations, they have noted the rupture between its structure of tribute and trade or “the Chinese world order” and the new system of nation-states governed by international law. Chinese reluctance to accept the rules introduced by the Great Powers into Asia went through many stages, and it is only recently that the government in Beijing is seen to be functioning comfortably in the dominant United Nations state-system. It is possible to explain that change as inevitable. After all, in the world of nationstates, China has no choice but play by the rules that guide the actions of all other states. But the fact that it took China so long to demonstrate that it accepted the key aspects of the system and the fact that some neighbouring states in Asia still have doubts about China's future intentions suggest that the issues remain less clear-cut than might have been expected.

On one hand, the position that imperial China had insisted on in dealing with foreign rulers through the centuries was always accompanied by given sets of ritual, defined levels of hierarchy and agreed criteria of hegemonic authority. However, despite the sense of continuity that Confucian historians have given to the nature of Chinese dynastic rule, there was never any immutable structure of tributary relationships. What seemed unchanging were the language of feudal condescension and the administrative rules drawn up by various Chinese courts to deal with power realities at different periods of history. Chinese rulers and mandarins had to be flexible in interpreting tribute relations according to the political, economic, security or cultural needs at any one time. They employed terms that appealed to forms of fealty, family or friendship with most of them interchangeable depending on circumstances.

On the other hand, the practical position China have taken since the second half of the nineteenth century was guided by principles of law incorporated into a modern system of nationstates introduced from the West. Despite the legal language that shaped modern international behaviour, the Chinese were painfully aware that much of that was subject to close examination and that, for each situation, there were always specific political, economic and security calculations to be made.

In Song Ong Siang's One Hundred Years’ History of the Chinese in Singapore, the ambiguity of identity in the nineteenth century Baba (now more commonly called Peranakan) or Straits Chinese community as compared with the finely differentiated and multiple labels used by the newcomers from China was striking. But, as far as I can tell, both groups of Chinese experienced uncertainty when it came to more modern ideas of loyalty. There were questions like, how should they show loyalty to an emerging sense of nation in China as compared with local British authority? Which had priority? Could they put their cultural heritage, customs and practices and family priorities above the calls to support race-and-nation salvation? What should they do when different parties fighting for power in Republican China asked for their allegiance?

When I was invited to talk about identity and loyalty in Singapore, I knew that the National Library did not expect a lecture to do justice to a topic that would need volumes to cover. They wanted to draw attention to it and have someone open up a discussion on how it might be perceived today. I am content to do just that. For decades, I have struggled off and on with aspects of Chinese identity in China and among Chinese overseas. In 1985, I went beyond the safety of history to explore recent perspectives and hosted a conference at the Australian National University on “Changing identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese since World War II”. That made me even more aware how difficult it is to pin down the concept of identity in a world that was changing fast during the twentieth century.

Here I shall share with you some of my ideas about identity. It is foolhardy of me to do this in front of an audience of Singaporeans. I am conscious that I am not telling you anything new about this city-state but hope that you will find it interesting to hear my efforts to understand the subject. What is new for me is to try and connect identity with loyalty. I believe that identity precedes loyalty. It can clarify what one is to be loyal to.

Dividing empires into new nations was a major political gift of modernity in Southeast Asia. These empires have been a very large part of my life ever since I became aware of the world around me. My parents talked about the Dutch, the British and the Japanese empires incessantly when I was a boy. Both of them were born in Qing China, an empire on its last legs. They were conscious that the end of that empire simply meant that China was at the mercy of other empires. They had grown up with the threat of the Japanese empire spreading from Korea to Manchuria, and poised in North China ready to invade the rest of China. But there was nowhere else for them to turn to get away from empires. After graduation from Southeastern University in Nanjing (itself once an imperial capital), my father was offered a job to go to the Nanyang to educate the children of overseas Chinese. He went to work, first in British Malaya and then in Dutch Java, both places ruled by Europeans who were confident that their empires would go on indefinitely. But even there, there was already the growing shadow of a powerful Japanese empire.

Thus, when I first met Nicholas Tarling over fifty years ago, I was struck by how he was immersed in the study of empires in the Malay world in which I had grown up. I had found the British and imperial history I was taught at school difficult to like. At the time I met Nick Tarling, I was looking forward to the decolonization taking place that would bring that history to an end. Therefore, I was intrigued to meet someone who was so deeply interested in the imperial story. Nick Tarling went on to devote his professional life to describing those empires. He was not content to study British power at its peak but followed the story to the retreat of all Western empires after the Japanese defeats of 1942–45. He then went further to examine the various ways each of the empires was wound down and how some of them developed other power systems to deal with the region.

When I began to put this volume together, I recalled my links with the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS). That reminded me of the time fifty years ago when Goh Keng Swee talked to me about establishing the institute. I was most intrigued by his foresight (see Chapter 4 on Remembering Goh Keng Swee in this volume). Other memories flooded in as I collected some of my recent writings to affirm my ISEAS connection. As a result, the book is now also a book of personal reflections and encounters about the region that the Chinese knew as Nanyang, often projected through images of Malaysia and Singapore. Behind the events after the end of World War II that shaped the new nations and settled the fates of their Chinese populations, a number of issues touching on a mixed heritage also came to mind.

In January 2016, my wife Margaret reminded me that we have lived in Singapore for twenty years. We were surprised how quickly the years had passed and noted that the period is the longest both of us have ever spent in any one place in our lives. I had spent some seventeen years growing up in Ipoh. Margaret spent the first twenty-four years of her life in Shanghai, Penang, Singapore, Cambridge, London, and back to Singapore. We then had in succession nine years in Kuala Lumpur, eighteen years in Canberra and ten years in Hong Kong. As a student, I had spent a year and a half in Nanjing, five years in Singapore and three years in London. This volume is thus also one that marks some of my changing perspectives on Singapore, Malaya and Malaysia.

I grew up as a Chinese in Malaya among millions of other Chinese in the Nanyang. Like many others, I was taught to think of China as home and my parents prepared me to return there. That day came in 1947, when the three of us moved to Nanjing, my father to teach at the school attached to his alma mater, by then renamed National Central University, and I to take the entrance examinations to seek a place at his university.

I first met Goh Keng Swee in London in the mid-1950s at meetings in Malaya Hall and remember the occasions when he talked about the future of an independent Malaya. We met again after I returned in 1957 to teach at the University of Malaya in Singapore and he invited me occasionally to lunch to talk about the Malaya that had just become independent. We agreed that it was only a matter of time when Singapore will also be independent. We talked about the factors that kept Singapore and the Federation apart and saw that the British wanted their colony to serve their trading and strategic purposes for as long as possible. We met informally a few more times and even talked about what a Malayan identity might be like. I also recall moments when we touched on the question of being overseas Chinese in Malaya and Singapore and what the rise of China could mean to their lives.

When the University of Malaya established its Kuala Lumpur campus in 1959, I volunteered to teach there. Dr Goh understood that as my way of continuing to prepare for the day when the two territories became one country. The efforts to establish a new federation called Malaysia began soon afterwards. From 1959 till the separation in 1965, I visited Singapore several times. Some of my trips had to do with preparing the volume of essays, Malaysia: A Survey (1964) that I was editing. Others were made after I was appointed in 1964 by Singapore's Minister for Education, Ong Pang Boon, to chair the Nanyang University Curriculum Review Committee. This was to make recommendations concerning the university's future in the new Malaysian Federation. Yet others were for me to give lectures in the old campus, now renamed the University of Singapore while the division in Kuala Lumpur retained the Malaya name. During some of these visits, I saw Dr Goh and he was interested to hear my views of the new country from a KL perspective.

After separation and the republic's independence, he asked to see me in 1967 about the establishment of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and outlined his plans to build a centre that would help Singapore understand the region and be at the same time a research institution of international repute.

Heritage can unite communities, but it can also divide different communities and even the people within each community. With the advent of modernity, other layers of complexity are added. When the quest for modernity puts great pressure on individuals and communities, it can bring greater intensity to existing divisions and also create new sources of division. The lecture I gave in honour of Herb Feith, a scholar who closely examined early political divisions in an independent Indonesia, gave me the opportunity to talk about modernity. I saw modernity as a goal that the peoples of different origins in Malaysia and Singapore, and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, wanted for their respective countries. But some aspects of the modernity ideal have not brought them shared values. On the contrary, they seem to have divided the peoples further during the first decades of decolonization.

These were divisions that Herb Feith and I have talked about the few times when we met. We were concerned about the divisions for different reasons, but we shared a common interest in how they reflect the problems that developing countries faced when trying hard to become modern quickly. His particular concern was the travails of Indonesia while mine began with the troubled start to the new state of Malaysia. For both of us, our interests included political and cultural issues among the Chinese, not least those influenced by post-revolutionary China. I gave the lecture with a heavy heart. It reminded me that John Legge and I were among the last persons to see Herb Feith on the Monash campus on 15 November 2001, hours before he was killed in a tragic accident. We had just had a thoughtful discussion about the fate of Chinese communities in certain parts of Indonesia after the fall of President Suharto. John Legge's presence when we talked was important. Herb Feith and I had not seen each other for more than a decade and it was John Legge who initiated our meeting and gave me a chance to hear his views about the latest developments in Indonesian democracy. I vividly recall that last discussion we had before we parted. We touched on the subject of new kinds of divisiveness in Southeast Asian society. We had shared views about how these were caused in part by the different expectations that people had about the pursuit of modernity.

The many studies of the Baba or Chinese Peranakan of the three cities of the former Straits Settlements have provided us with an intriguing picture of a wonderfully distinct community. At the first international conference on Chinese Peranakan, I congratulated the organizers for taking the initiative to broaden the subject beyond the Malay peninsula. I also thought that what made the conference special was the way it honoured Tun Tan Cheng Lock who was one of the most important Peranakan Chinese of the twentieth century. He is remembered for his many contributions to the history of Malaya. His story, not only his leadership of Peranakan but also his success in providing a bridge between Peranakan and other Chinese, as well as between Chinese and Malays and other communities of Malaysia, was a remarkable achievement. When fully told, the story would provide us with a better sense of what the Peranakan phenomenon means for those who inherited that heritage.

I had from young seen the community largely from afar, but in the last decade, I have read some remarkable studies and become more familiar with the Singapore community as it is. This has helped me understand how the community has been developing. For example, the TV shows, the revival of certain parts of the culture and, most of all, the historic establishment of the Peranakan Museum. Some years ago, before the opening of the museum, I had the privilege to be invited by the Peranakan Association to talk about “the Peranakan in a global setting”, a topic close to the theme of this conference. At that talk, I concentrated on some features of the community that had attracted my attention. I spoke about the strength of the Peranakan family and the role of the women, especially their roles as mothers, and the effect of time and place on those who grew up in Peranakan families. I looked at the life choices made by individual Peranakan, the consequences of those choices on their later lives, and also about how they kept their identity differently from most other Chinese spread around the world.

The Chinese neighbours that I grew up with in Ipoh, Malaya in the 1930s and 1940s practised different sets of family rituals and practices. Through these acts, they felt connected with the past as immigrants from China. Done regularly, that provided many occasions for the community to come together. Living in Singapore for the past twenty years, I note how some similar activities perform the same role today. In addition, I am happy to see that the National Heritage Board and various community organizations are doing more to alert people to the value of their cultural artefacts. That, however, is not enough if there are no parallel efforts to connect key aspects of Chinese heritage with knowledge of the historical conditions that produced them.

Like other communities, most Chinese see their heritage as relevant to their lives but are not always aware that it also represents the living past. It is relevant because it is closely related to their migratory traditions within the region over the past two centuries as well as to the homes in China from where their ancestors had come. Conscious or not, what they practise and what they respect, including what they are learning from past experience, is part of their heritage. It would be a pity if the heritage's links with history are taken for granted. A better understanding of the linkages should make their heritage more meaningful to their lives.

For some fifty years, experts at UNESCO have helped the world to think of heritage sites and practices as part of the heritage of humankind. These experts have a strong sense of history, and we are thankful that they have thus enriched our lives. In particular, they have demonstrated that protecting one's heritage can improve our appreciation of what is now being lost and forgotten. Their work reminds us that familiarity with history is essential if we are to appreciate what heritage means.

We all hope that modernity and globalization have softened the differences among the peoples in Asia, but it is obvious that, where heritage is concerned, distinctive attitudes remain. Singapore is no exception. The multiple cultures of its peoples are separate from, if not at odds with, one another.