Another nation’s cultural production should not become custodian of Singaporeans’ deepest feelings about ancestry, dialect, and belonging.
Dear You (给阿嬷的情书) has become a lightning rod of Singapore’s most charged cultural debate in years: Whether the Infocomm Media Authority was right to require a Mandarin dub under a 1979 Speak Mandarin Campaign policy that had long since done its job: Households using Chinese dialects as their primary language dropped from 76 percent in 1980 to 8.7 percent in 2020.
Having watched Dear You on June 20 – and enjoyed it thoroughly – I’d like to explain why the public discourse around the film matters, and why it matters considerably more than the dubbing controversy that followed.
But first, a note: This essay discusses the film’s plot in some detail, including its central twist. If you have not seen it, it is worth your two hours first.
Storytelling made for Bangkok, transcending language
The story opens with an indebted grandson who travels to Bangkok chasing a rumoured billionaire grandfather. What he finds is that his grandfather, Zheng Musheng, drowned in 1960, and the letters and remittances that continued arriving in Chaoshan for over a decade came not from him but from Xie Nanzhi, a Thai-Chinese woman of Teochew descent, who maintained the fiction of his survival to protect his widow, Ye Shurou, from grief. A typhoon, a delayed mailman, a photograph without its explanatory letter, caused Shurou to conclude that Musheng, her husband, had started a new family.
The production team even recreated old Bangkok Chinatown, cast a Thai actress of Teochew descent as the elderly Nanzhi, and invited leaders of the Tio Chew Association of Thailand to make cameo appearances.
Damai Entertainment’s simultaneous June 2026 rollout across nine territories, including Thailand and Singapore, and amplified by Chinese state media apparatus, generated a box office record exceeding ¥1.8 billion.
My lecturers at Ngee Ann Polytechnic’s School of Film & Media Studies spent considerable effort teaching us to read narrative architecture, not merely receive it. And on that score, Dear You is a masterclass in storytelling that transcends language – even in the Mandarin-dubbed version I watched, with patchy English subtitles.
But my other training – in war studies and international relations – obliges me to bring a second lens to the film; that even if the intent is innocent, what is its effect? And who benefits from the particular controversy generated around its release in Singapore?
The civilizational pull
To answer that, I reach for Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. Huntington argued that civilizational identity – ethnic, cultural, linguistic – would become the primary fault line of post-Cold War politics, and that the overseas Chinese diaspora would be a vector through which China’s civilizational gravity operates beyond its borders; not through coercion, but through the pull of shared ancestry, language, and cultural memory.
We already have evidence of this closer to home. When Mr. Lawrence Wong became Singapore’s 4th Prime Minister in 2024, Chinese social media produced content celebrating his Hainanese ancestral roots – banners at his ancestral hall in Wenchang, videos tracing his family migration – framing a Singaporean leader’s elevation as an overseas Chinese success story.
Dear You follows a similar logic:
- Zheng Musheng’s suffering is caused not by the Communist Party, but by the Kuomintang (KMT), British colonial authority, and Indian businessmen who burn down the hostel that housed Musheng and Chaoshan compatriots on Mid-Autumn Festival night.
- A qiaopi letter writer whom Musheng befriends runs illegal Chinese-language classes for children in defiance of a Thai government ban; the film frames those literacy efforts as just.
- The letters that fail to reach Chaoshan unfold against the years when American strategic interests reshaped Chinese community institutions across Southeast Asia.
- Xie Nanzhi’s 18-year deception, meanwhile, presents the huaqiao bond as operating above state jurisdiction – preserving Musheng’s support for his Chaoshan family after his death; Ye Shurou eventually repays that kindness in Bangkok, across intermediaries and national boundaries.
None of this proves the film was designed to draw overseas Chinese communities into China’s civilizational gravity. But taken together, these choices appear to create an allegory in which ethnic bonds outlast host-state politics, while local policies deemed hostile to those bonds are framed as serving forces inimical to the Chinese community everywhere.
Foreign influence patterns – coincidental?
But China’s cultural projection abroad has a problem Beijing understands well. The lived encounter with contemporary PRC nationals in Southeast Asia – burglary syndicates exploiting visa-free entry, antisocial incidents in public spaces, reckless wealth display – can harden public perceptions in ways cultural diplomacy struggles to undo.
Films like Dear You have the capacity to cultivate emotional memory at the deeper civilizational level – ancestry, language, sacrifice, family – that sits beneath overt propaganda. Lianhe Zaobao correspondent Sim Tze Wei reflected that the film’s power lay in “stirring emotions without slogans about loyalty”, and that even if this was not the director’s intent, it could still be regarded as “a highly successful piece of (Chinese) united front work”.
To assert that Dear You is state-directed propaganda would be too crude a claim. But what Singaporeans should be alive to is the film’s civilizational argument – the way it frames Chinese identity, memory, grievance, and kinship as forces more durable than the political arrangements of host states.
Consider also the film’s amplification through state-linked media channels, its timing alongside the anti-Indian foreign-originated content operation in Singapore, and the reported organized screenings for overseas Chinese communities.
Taken together, these elements constitute a pattern no sensible security analyst should dismiss as coincidental. I explored the mechanics of that influence architecture, Frontier influencers, earned media, and the new propaganda playbook, published the week before this film opened here.
Building locally produced cultural referents
If Singaporeans are not prepared to rule out the effects of propaganda altogether, then much of the debate over the past two weeks has been misdirected.
Too much of it has treated IMDA’s Mandarin dub directive as the primary cause of the controversy. But the deeper failure is whether Singapore has done enough to build a distinct culture – confident enough to absorb new immigrants, and strong enough not to let another country’s cultural production define our own emotional inheritance. That does not sit within IMDA’s mandate.
Professor Wang Gungwu, Singapore’s most distinguished historian of the Chinese diaspora, has long argued that Singapore’s Chinese majority must distinguish between zhongguo wenhua (中国文化) – contemporary national Chinese culture, the product of a specific party-state – and zhonghua wenming (中华文明) – the broader civilizational heritage the diaspora may legitimately claim.
He warned that China “may not think it necessary or important to project them separately” and asked whether overseas Chinese “might be expected to provide a singular response” should Beijing call on them.
Singapore’s best protection, he argued, is a confident and locally rooted identity that can engage civilizational heritage without being captured by nationalist claims upon it.
In that context, Singapore’s cultural strategy must go beyond language policy or content classification to building locally produced cultural referents, capable of inoculating communities against civilizational capture because they provide an authentic alternative.
Our ‘own goal’ was, therefore, not that Singapore “suppressed Teochew,” but that regulators accepted a PRC production firm’s Mandarin dub as the vehicle for wider access, while inadequately distinguishing between Chaoshan as PRC cultural production and Teochew as Singaporean lived inheritance. As an unintended result, a film that might have remained a niche dialect screening became a more accessible carrier of civilizational memory.
I can understand why prominent cultural figures and Members of Parliament have questioned whether IMDA’s dialect policy remains fit for purpose. But by framing the controversy mainly as a matter of language access and regulatory overreach, they also helped turn Dear You into a domestic cause, while leaving its wider cultural argument mostly unexamined.
Conclusion: The power of ancestry, dialect, and belonging
Every state uses culture as an instrument of foreign policy. The United States has Hollywood, Britain has the BBC, and South Korea has K-pop. And at its most benign, Dear You is Chinese soft power done well. The Hollywood Reporter called it China’s underdog box office phenomenon of 2026, and I thought it was an extraordinary work of accidental cinema.
Whether something more organized sits beneath the surface, we may never know. But that uncertainty is less important than what Singapore’s reaction revealed. China’s Global Times even chided Singapore for lacking confidence in its own culture, reading our defensiveness as insecurity. They are not entirely wrong. These reactions indicate that Singapore must do more to ensure that another nation’s cultural production does not become the default custodian of what Singaporeans sincerely feel about ancestry, dialect, and belonging.
Dear You may have been made for Thailand, not Singapore. But if this is how we reacted when we were not the target, we should think harder about what happens when we are.
Also read: “Frontier influencers, earned media, and the new propaganda playbook” (June 16, 2026).
Marcus Loh is the Chairman of the Public Affairs Group at the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) Asia Pacific and a Director at Temus, a Singapore AI and digital services firm. Formerly the President of the Institute of Public Relations of Singapore, he helped strengthen the role of strategic communication and public affairs amid shifting policy, technological, and geoeconomic landscapes. He is currently an MA candidate at the War Studies Department of King’s College London.
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Featured image: Wikimedia Commons
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