Zhang Jiayi

It would be easy to read the dubbing debate itself as a story about Teochew speakers, since the film that sparked it is in Teochew, but that's not what the data shows: Hokkien and Cantonese speakers, with no direct stake in that particular film, care almost as much. The debate is about something bigger than one movie (and my guess is the indignance/grief about being told their dialect didn't belong on television), and Chinese Singaporeans carry these feelings in a way Malay and Indian Singaporeans, whose heritage languages were never institutionally targeted the same way, don't.

I observe a say-do gap here; respondents say that heritage language is fading, it matters to identity, and they are concerned about it. Yet only 11% think preservation should be left to families and communities themselves; most want a public or institutional response instead. Why is there this inclination to "outsource"/"offload" a marker of self-identity?

The other open question that the finding throws up is what actually gets lost. The top three worries, losing the language itself, the next generation losing touch with community history, and cultural practices not passing down, sit within two points of each other. These three worries point to a larger concern: the loss of something intangible that the heritage language symbolises.

A survey can measure that people are anxious about transmission; it can't tell me what memories, values, or ways of relating to family don't translate once English or Mandarin takes over at home. That's the more interesting question I'd want a follow-up study to answer, so we know exactly what's being lost and what's worth preserving.

Environmental protection turns out to be a bigger tent than heritage preservation. More people want the Maju Forest project paused or reconsidered than say the same about Gillman Barracks (26% versus 18%), and when I look at what's actually driving concern across both sites, loss of biodiversity, greenery and habitat leads by a clear margin over loss of heritage or historical value. People rally behind ecological loss more readily than architectural or historical loss, at least in this data.

The online conversation around both projects reads like the public feels shut out, or blindsided, until the very last minute. The survey tells a more complicated story: trust in government to make the right call runs high, and most people believe their feedback carries at least some real weight. What people want is to be consulted earlier: a majority want to be consulted before plans are finalised rather than after, and three in four say they'd show up if given the chance. Of course, this is self-reported; I'd be curious to see how it matches up against actual attendance at these events.

Trust in government turns out to be the single sharpest divide in the entire dataset, more than age, ethnicity, or whether someone lives near the site marked for redevelopment. People who don't trust the government rate the current process as far less adequate (15% versus 61% overall), and I expected that to translate into disengagement, people checking out of a process they don't believe in.

The data points otherwise: the same skeptics are more likely, not less, to say they'd definitely show up next time, and they want more of nearly every accountability mechanism on offer, from public disclosure of how feedback changed the plans to independent review. Instead of disengaging, they're asking for a process robust enough that an institution they don't trust can't quietly bypass them, and I think that's exactly the finding a government communications team should be building the next consultation around.

I'd expected people to work out logistics, feeding, confinement, childcare, before committing to a child, the way you'd plan any other major decision. What surprised me is that the decision itself sits in a different, more emotional register than everything that follows it.

And since the decision is emotional, the support people actually need is emotional too: less judgment, more compassion, and more open conversation before the fact, about the guilt many new mothers describe, and what other parents actually went through. Right now, that kind of exchange mostly only starts once someone is already pregnant.

Once the decision is made, the easy assumption is that money buys you out of the hard parts, hire a helper, enrol in infant care, lean on grandparents down the road. The interviews tell a more complicated story.

Formal care comes with real limits: sick days, sudden closures, hours that don't stretch to a demanding job. Hired help comes with its own costs, training, trust, space, privacy, that some families decide aren't worth it. And even family support, the option respondents leaned on most, isn't something to lean on without care; retirees have their own lives, and it shouldn't come bundled with unspoken expectations about how caregiving should be done. The popular image of a well-resourced Singapore parent undersells how limited every option actually is; the load rarely fully leaves the parents' hands.

Formal policy support should, in theory, fill some of these gaps. In practice, some of the friction isn't about what's on offer at all, it's administrative. A leave day that depends on a manager's goodwill, an eligibility rule keyed to job tenure rather than need, an income cap that excludes a squeezed middle from support while still leaving them waiting for services they're paying full price for: these are barriers to help that families thought they could access, and often only find out about once they're already relying on it.

Closing those gaps would help, but I don't think it's the deepest lever. Because the decision runs on emotion rather than arithmetic, policy, even friction-free policy, has a narrower job than it's often given credit, or blamed, for. Respondents were positive about the latest support measures, but consistently said they wouldn't tip someone from not wanting a child to wanting one, at most nudging the timing of a second child sooner.

The sharper barrier sits in culture: workplace friction around taking time for a child, and small daily moments, a ramp lowered as a surprise rather than a norm, a mother judged over struggling to breastfeed, that add up to parenting still being treated as an inconvenience rather than the default. Building a real family-friendly society is less about playgrounds and nursing rooms in malls, since we largely have that covered, and more about a shift in how parents are treated day to day.

Attitudes sort people more cleanly in this study than the demographic cuts I'd normally reach for first. Someone who's personally been made to feel uncomfortable because of race is far more likely to see immigration as tension-inducing (86% versus 74%), more than twice as likely to name race itself as a barrier to opportunity (33% versus 15%, this against a backdrop where race ranks near the bottom of perceived barriers overall, well behind education at 68%), and somewhat more likely to see racist comments as a worsening trend (51% versus 38%) and to trust a fellow Singaporean a little less in a crisis (83% versus 88%).

Protectionism tells a sharper version of the same story. Whether someone wants Singapore jobs prioritised over foreign talent shows no significant skew by age, gender, education, income or employment status. The only demographic that predicts it at all is race, and not evenly: Malay respondents are the most protectionist group in the entire survey at 85%, Indian and Other respondents the least at 57%. Two groups who report similarly elevated experience of racial mistreatment land on opposite sides of a live policy question.

78% think the Government's decision to call out and investigate the racist comments was warranted, and 71% think the OB markers on race and speech are clearer for it. Separately, 79% agree immigration has made ethnic relations more tense, and 70% want Singapore jobs prioritised over foreign talent. I don't think approving of one specific incident's handling cancels out anxiety about the wider trend it sits inside; they seem to coexist rather than resolve each other.

It even runs the other way. Respondents who lean protectionist on jobs are noticeably cooler on the intervention itself, 76% call it warranted versus 83% among those who'd stay open to foreign talent, and more likely to read it as restricting free speech rather than safeguarding it (36% versus 20%). Agreeing the Government got this one call right doesn't mean people have made peace with the bigger picture around it.

What this tells me is that the protectionist unease underneath all this isn't fundamentally a race issue, it's anxiety over competition and opportunity. This whole study exists because of a racially-charged flashpoint, but the unease it's tangled up with isn't one people frame in racial terms themselves.

41% say they understand the frustration behind the comments even if it went too far, more than the 33% who strongly condemn them outright, no excuse.

The one group that doesn't extend that understanding is Indian and Other respondents, the ones the comments were actually aimed at: 52% strongly condemn them outright, versus 30% of Chinese and 32% of Malay respondents. The people extending the most understanding are, unsurprisingly, not the ones who were targeted.

That's real data, but it doesn't answer the question I actually have, which is a counterfactual this survey can't test: would that 41% understanding-figure hold if the target had been the majority race instead, or if the comments had attacked Singapore's nationality broadly rather than one specific ethnic group. Empathy is easy to extend when the target isn't the group holding the most social power.

Out of every study I've run, this is the most divided. None of the others get close to a 50-50 split, and this one does, again and again: 55% call the increase justified after hearing the arguments, 52% agree ministers need to be paid highly to attract capable people, 50% agree it's needed to minimise corruption, the weakest-held of the three. Whether someone accepts the national narrative behind high ministerial pay is close to a coin flip, and that split is what everything else in this study sits on top of.

None of the five arguments actually raised in the public debate move opinion by much, even "the PM donates his increment," the strongest of the five, only shifts 56% toward more favourable. What people ask for instead is a different process: 31% want future pay reviews handled by a genuinely independent body with citizen representation, ahead of every other concession on offer, including publishing what each minister actually earns (23%). Who gets to decide matters more here than what the decision costs.

More than a quarter of Singaporeans, 26%, say simply announcing this at a different moment, one where job security and retrenchments are less on people's minds, would make it easier to accept. The open-ended responses back that reading up from a different angle: the single largest theme among 903 write-in answers, 40% of them, frames the increase against the cost of living and job insecurity rather than objecting to ministers being paid well as a matter of principle. The complaint here is less about the policy than about when it was announced.

Ask Singaporeans about the ministers' salary increase and the MPs' allowance increase separately, and the numbers land in almost the same place both times: 76% give the identical answer before hearing the arguments, 77% after, 74% on how the Government should proceed. The quantums involved are very different, but ordinary Singaporeans aren't parsing that difference. This reads as one issue, "the political class getting a raise," not two, and there's no real appetite in this data for treating ministers and MPs as separate conversations.

This is a clear picture of an awareness gap. Only 28% had followed the Government's statement closely before the survey, and just 29% can pick out what chemical castration actually is, a reversible medication taken regularly. About half think it is permanent, 41% a permanent injection and another 10% surgical removal. Support barely notices: 91% back it among those who describe it correctly, 88% among those who don't.

What seems to hold support up is trust. 96% of supporters trust the Government to make the right decision on this, against 54% of opponents, and trust sits at around nine in ten whether or not people understand the treatment. To me this looks like a topic Singaporeans are comfortable handing to the Government and the courts to decide.

Trust in the Government runs high on this topic: 90% trust it to make the right decision on chemical castration, and 39% trust it strongly. On the Maju Forest and Gillman Barracks redevelopments, the equivalent figures are 77% and 20%. The two questions were worded slightly differently, so I'd read the gap as directional, but it is a wide one.

My hunch is that Singaporeans extend more trust to the Government on crime, punishment and internal affairs than on infrastructure and development. Two topics can't confirm that, and it is the pattern I'd want to test on a third.

The debate, as I read it, stays at the philosophical level: curbing sex drive on one side, bodily autonomy on the other. Among supporters, the leading reason is that it reduces reoffending by suppressing sex drive (49%). Opponents' two most common objections are that it only addresses sexual desire (35%) and that it violates bodily autonomy (32%). And, as above, few know the treatment is reversible.

What would make it applicable, in people's eyes, is protection. Support is broadest for a repeat offender (70%) and for offences against children, and falls to 34% for a first-time offender against an adult stranger. The strongest levers for more support follow the same logic: an assurance that it is limited to the most serious cases (50%), and long-term evidence that offenders don't reoffend once treatment stops (47%).

For government communications, that points to assurance and evidence. A local pilot sits near the bottom of what would help (20%). What the public seems to want is proof that it works in protecting potential victims, and a clear line around the cases it applies to.

The client wanted a monthly read, with the same questionnaire every month for six months. The intention was to see whether attitudes would fluctuate over time, on the hypothesis that they would shift as the wider economic environment changed. What we got was very flat data. Worry about the cost of living sat at 94–95% in every wave, and of the 90 comparisons against launch, only 6 came out statistically significant, about what chance alone would produce. Three of those six are the same shift, optimism about policy direction edging up from 29% to 34–35%.

There was a real learning in that. If you are running a brand tracker, think very carefully about the frequency. Month on month was too frequent here. I would suggest once every six months, or once a year, and treating it as a temperature read, since it won't tell you what happened in that stretch to cause an uptick. If what you want to understand is the uptick from a particular event, that calls for a directed study.

What amazed me is how closely cost of living and COE policy are tied together in people's minds, and how far that goes beyond car owners. Among people with no car and no access to one, who make up just over half the sample, 88% say COE prices are too high and 69% agree rising COE prices add to the cost-of-living burden. Those with access to a car are more likely to say so (84%), but non-owners clearly feel it too.

Non-owners are vested in how COE works and how fair it can be. It could be that many of them want to own a car at some point, which this survey wasn't built to test. Either way, COE is a national concern, and looking only at how car owners think would miss much of the picture.

"Neutral" here means political party support: people who back neither the Ruling nor the Opposition party. What interested me is that their answers are not neutral. On the questions about how the Government is handling COE and the cost of living, they sit closer to Opposition supporters than to Ruling Party supporters, and only 33% of them are confident in the Government's cost-of-living management, against 57% of Ruling Party supporters.

On worry itself, the parties barely differ. 94% of Neutrals are concerned about the cost of living, the same as Ruling Party supporters, and 90% say COE prices are too high. Neutrals are also the largest group in the sample, around four in ten respondents. Put together, the average Singaporean here is worried about both, and on COE prices specifically, not convinced the Government has it in hand: 26% say it is doing enough, 37% say it isn't.