Should Singapore continue to share her Developmental Experiences with other Countries?

     Singapore, as a small country, should continue to share our development experiences with other countries, but not everything we know. This is because other countries may take advantage of us and stop working with us when they know our "secrets". As we are a samll country with no natural resources, it will have a huge impact on us if countries know our developmental techniques and broke off all ties with us, taking away the techniques and overtaking us. No one can guarantee if those countires would "betray" us, so to stay on the safe side, I think that we should not share everything we know with them.

     However, I believe that we could still share some experiences with them, so as to maintain a good and healthy relationship with reliant countries and show them that we are also of some form of use to them because at the end of the day, we still depend heavily on these countries for our revenue and income.

Why is Singapore's relationship with China important?

I think that it is important for Singaporeans to be humble and maintain a good relationship with China. China and Singapore has many business relationships with each other throughout the years, such as trading and educational exchanges.

These are very important to Singapore as it helps us to earn a lot of money and boosts our economy. Without China's cooperation, Singapore may earn way lesser than we used to which will greatly affect our way of life, such as high unemployment rates. Singapore is very reliant on China as we have no natural resources, but comparatively, China is not that reliant on Singapore. Hence, with each other's partnership, Singapore's economy will be heavily impacted but this is not the case for China.

However, due to the tensions between America and China, Singapore, who maintains good relationships with both sides, finds it increasingly hard to get well with both countries. Additionally, due to the South China Sea affair, China has further accused Singapore for taking sides. From this, I personally think that Singapore should be more aware of these small little things that may offense China unknowingly.

We should never be complacent about our good relationships as they could end at any moment and we should all try our best to make it last.

My Thoughts on Culture

From what I learnt on chinese culture, I think that we all should be aware of our actions in China as many of them could offense the Chinese people without us knowing.

For example, we should call the people by their surnames to show that we respect them. We do not do that in Sinagapore often so that is a difference between our cultures. In China, it is considered rude to stick your chopsticks upright in your rice bowl or to tap your chopsticks on your bowl. We also practice this in Singapore so it is considered a similarity. In Singapore, we point things using our index finger but in China, they point at things using their thumb as it is considered rude to do so with their index finger. As we are used to point at things using our index finger, I think that we should be extra careful in China so as to not offense anyone there.

Apart from these practices, there are also many similar festivals that we celebrate such as Chinese New Year. However, Sinagapore, being a multi-racial country, celebrates Hari Raya and Deepavali while China does not as they do not have many Indian or Malay people living there, hence they did not make it a tradition to celebrate these festivals. The food we eat are similar to China's cuisines but not every dish. In China, we rarely see Indian or Malay food but we can all see Indian and Malay food such as roti prata and nasi lemak being sold in Singapore. Singaporeans dress in all types of beautiful traditional clothes — sari for Indians, baju kurong, baju melayu, baju kebaya for Malays, and the cheongsam for the Chinese. However, in China, people only wear the cheongsam during Chinese New Year.

In conclusion, there are many difficulties as well as similarities between China's culture and Singapore's so we should embrace these differences and be sensitive to each other's practices so as to maintain good relationships with them.