By Sim Chi Yin
China Correspondent
chiyin@sph.com.sg

 

IN BEIJING

TINY Singapore does not often make the news in mega mainland China.
But last night, it did!

A minutes-long segment made it onto China’s main news bulletin on CCTV at 7pm.

No, it wasn’t about an important policy or some celebrity. It was the good ol’ Merlion that got Singapore its few quirky minutes of fame.

CCTV carried a report of the Merlion statue at One Fullerton being struck and damaged by lightning on Saturday afternoon. It showed footage of its charred mane and a hole now lodged at the statue’s base.

The official Xinhua news agency also carried reports on this on its English and Chinese services.

While China’s officials speak of learning from the Singapore experience – or the “Singapore Dream” as a Chinese news magazine put it recently – the city state doesn’t make the news here all that often.

That said, Singapore did became a bit of a talking point here was in late 2007 when Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew remarked, hypothetically, that Singapore “would be happy to rejoin” resource-rich Malaysia – “if they would just educate the Chinese and Indians, use them and treat them as their citizens, they can equal us and even do better than us and we would be happy to rejoin them.”

That made it onto the main pages of major Chinese news websites.

For weeks and months after that, mainland Chinese white collar workers and taxi drivers alike asked Singaporeans living here if it was true that Singapore was “going to rejoin Malaysia”.

And for a while, that was only second to other favourite remarks mainlanders make to Singaporeans: “Oh your country is so clean” and “Prisoners are caned in your country, right?”

The Merlion may not be about heavy matters of the state.

But in many a photo album in homes here, there would be pictures of the half-fish, half-lion creature that is taken as Singapore’s icon – snapped on the ubiquitous Xin-Ma-Tai (Singapore-Malaysia-Thailand) tours that are now popular with the increasingly-middle class mainlanders.

And that, is perhaps why we made the news last night:
http://v.cctv.com/html/media/xinwenlianbo/2009/03/xinwenlianbo_300_20090301_15.shtml