Last month's violence between Malays and Indians was a reminder that ethnic suspicions lie below the surface of much of Malaysian life. This time the fighting was small-scale, but for many it must have recalled something far worse, the rioting of May 1969, in which the victims were almost all ethnic Chinese.
Large-scale Chinese immigration to the Malay peninsula began in the middle of the 19th century. But there had been important enclaves before this, notably in Malacca where the distinctive Baba culture, a product of intermarriage between Chinese men and Malay women, was established as early as the 15th century.
This book, a collection of accounts by 14 different scholars, is the first overview of its subject to be published in English for 50 years, and the first ever to be written in English entirely by scholars of Malaysian-Chinese descent.
The Chinese minorities in the countries of Southeast Asia have not always had an easy relationship with the larger ethnic groups they live alongside. They have sometimes been perceived as having divided loyalties, sympathetic partly to the country they live in, but also partly to the cultural legacy inherited from their ancestors in China.
And in times of crisis, regularly in Indonesia and occasionally elsewhere, this has been used by the numerically dominant groups as a pretext for a violent assertion of their own very different, usually Islamic, identities.
Few things could be more paradoxical. During the 1960s, Chinese communities were accused of secretly working for the People's Republic of China communists. A decade later they were blamed for their excessive affluence, and for spiriting wealth out of their countries of residence. Either way, the phenomenon of the need for a scapegoat couldn't be more vividly illustrated.
But as the contributors to this book insist, Malaysia is in many ways different. Here the Chinese presence has always been large (30 percent at the last count). In Singapore, which was briefly a part of Malaysia in the early post-colonial days, the Chinese dominance was so marked that the city broke away in 1965 and opted for total independence -- a move that appeared at the time to hold little promise.
Today, Chinese Malaysians exist under a form of legalized discrimination that works in favor of the ethnic Malays. Because of a system of racial quotas for institutions of higher education, an ethnically Chinese Malaysian needs in practice to obtain higher grades than a Malay to win the same university place. This strategy was originally announced as temporary, intended to last for about a generation. But its political aspect has meant that for the ruling party to drop the provision now would be equivalent to political suicide. In these days of rising discontent on other scores, it's not going to happen anytime soon.
There was a time when it seemed as if things might be different. During the transition to independence from the British, Chinese political organizations worked enthusiastically with Malay ones. In the first federal elections of 1955, for example, an alliance of Malay, Indian and conservative (in other words non-communist) Chinese groupings won 51 out of the 52 seats being contested.
But the 1957 constitution for the new state came down heavily on the side of Malay dominance. Malay was to be the sole national language, Islam the religion of the state, and the traditional position of the Malay sultans was safeguarded. Many Chinese were bitterly disappointed.
And indeed once independence had been achieved, Chinese participation in Malaysian public life was sharply curtailed. A low point in race relations was reached in 1969, when, following a general election in which Chinese parties fared badly, inter-ethnic riots broke out. Some 6,000 residents of Kuala Lumpur alone, almost all of them Chinese, lost everything they had. The official death toll was 178, a figure non-government sources considered to be too low.
Under Mahatir Mohamad, who succeeded as prime minister in 1981, Malaysia has managed to avoid several crucial pitfalls. It's highly significant, for instance, that the 1997 financial downturn produced neither a political crisis nor racial conflict in the country. In Indonesia, by contrast, it produced both.
When this book went to press there were six Chinese cabinet ministers at the national level, plus one state chief minister, and two state deputy ministers. Also, Malaysia is the only place outside China and Taiwan where Chinese-language education is part of the national school system. The downside is that government support for Chinese schooling ceases after elementary level.
It's a sign, perhaps, of an innate dynamism and adaptability that, despite officially sanctioned discrimination in favor of the Malay bumiputra ("sons of the soil"), Chinese Malaysians continue to flourish. One only needs to wander round the island of Penang to see, down lanes behind the incense-filled Chinese temples, gigantic mansions, set back from the road on their own grounds and surrounded by flowering trees. Penang is the most Chinese part of Malaysia, and these are the homes of men and women who lack nothing.
It would seem from this book that the Chinese in Malaysia have always been to a considerable extent self-sustaining, with mutual self-help societies being common.
This book is full of fascinating material, and not hard-going, even though it is essentially an academic work. But it's also authoritative, and is sure to be an important source of reference for some time to come, at least to researchers working in English.
Publication Notes
The Chinese in Malaysia
Edited by Lee Kam Hing and Tan Chee-Beng
418 pages
Oxford University Press
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