At 7:28 AM +0800 21/10/03, Grant Lee wrote:
>From: <kjkhoo at softhome.net>
> > the policy has been largely successful. Kuala Lumpur is today a
>> multi-ethnic town, as are the other large towns in the country.
>> Malay urbanization is now close to 50%. In a generation, the
>> poverty rate has been brought down to well under 10%, with the
>> poverty line income now defined at around Ringgit 540 per
>> household per month, average household size of 4.7
>
>Mahathir would love us to believe this. IMO this is drawing a
>false relationship. It's considered almost to be a truism, among
>comparative public policy theorists, that Malaysia's economic
>success is the results of incentives for foreign investment and
>export-oriented industries.
Foreign investments and EOI/EPZ's had something to do with it. But also massive social expenditure in health and education, not to mention a requirement that 50% of the EOI's (allowed 100% foreign ownership) were to be Malay. That resulted in a major rural-urban move, initially largely of women, into the EPZ's. Still, as you note, the move towards foreign investments and EPZ's was a policy move.
It might also be pointed out that around the region there were largely similar incentives for foreign investment and EOIs, which doesn't account for the differential economic performance.
It's all a bit of a joke. When Malaysia went on the EPZ/FTZ programme in the early 1970s, most leftist thinking was down on it. In the mid-1980s, there was much talk about how it was all unravelling, not least in the Asian Wall Street Journal of the time. Then in the 1990s, it all became a truism; which didn't prevent people turning around during the financial crisis.
The period of the biggest foreign investment inflows, following the Plaza Accord and the massive increase in Japanese FDI and in exports (in 1980, total trade was around 110% of GDP, up from the around 80% in 1970) also saw an increase in income inequality, after a secular decline over twenty years from a high gini of around .47 down to around .41
>Malaysia may have been even more successful _without_ the
>restrictions placed on minority business activity.
Tough to deal with counterfactuals. But other than Singapore, a not particularly comparable instance, what other massively plural society in the Furnivallian sense has really been as successful in the conventional sense, and minus the massive repressions?
I've seen some of the arguments about this particular counterfactual. My own opinion is that without something like the New Economic Policy, there would have been nothing. The condition of the first decade after independence couldn't have continued without significant ethnic conflict and massive instability. It may not be to your liking, but it's pretty hard to deny there has been significant success. Not least, how many third world instances of a voluntary return to an admittedly defective parliamentary democracy can you name from the period of the late 1960s/early 1970s?
As for the restrictions on minority business activity, the most prominent of which was the ICA, introduced in the 1970s, relaxed in the mid-1980s and again in the 1990s, the net result has been an increase of Chinese corporate equity ownership from around 20% in 1970 to about 40% in the 1990s, with foreign ownership declining to around 30%, and Malay ownership at around 20%. One example: All the well-known timber enterprises now noted for their activity in Siberia, PNG, South America, Africa are owned or controlled by Chinese, often family enterprises.
>Racist policies are essentially _anti-development_ , and there are
>plenty of examples to prove it.
In which case, Malaysia -- as in a number of other areas -- might well be your counter-example.
> > As and when it suits him; but you will find that
>> he's probably the most popular of the prime ministers amongst
>> Malaysia's Chinese population.
>
>Perhaps fear that things could get worse plays a part here. I
>mean I could introduce you to some conservative,
>business-oriented ethnic Chinese and/or "Indians" whose families
>preferred to leave Malaysia at various times over the last 30
>years because of persecution. (As well as some who left East
>Africa for similar reasons.)
Well, the height of his popularity was in the run-up to the 1995 elections and be assured that it was not fear that things could get worse, but a believe that the sun would never set -- remember, the Asian century and Asian values? It was Mahathir's moment of glory when he had a large swathe of the country rallying around his Vision 2020.
His moment of greatest unpopularity amongst the Chinese was in the second half of 1997 when the stock market dived with every statement he made. For a moment, there, it looked like a Malay majority would rally around a nationalist call, while a Chinese majority was rooting for an IMF-type policy. Then capital controls and the ringgit peg proved hugely popular with business, while the sacking of Anwar Ibrahim lost him the Malay majority.
I can also introduce you to many Chinese emigres to Australia who leave their families, at least their children, there, and return to Malaysia to make their living. What does that say?
There is racism -- official racism on the part of government, unofficial racism on the part of the Chinese -- but to characterise it as 'persecution' is to give a very misleading picture of the complexity of this place. Sorry, I happen to be Malaysian of Chinese descent, living in Malaysia and still trying to piece together the complex ambiguities of this place. For a moment, from late 1998 to early 1999, thanks to Anwar, it seemed as if we might stop being a society in contrary motion and actually forge a coalition that might represent a partial break from the past. But it was not to be as we resumed our contrary motion.
People have reason to protest, yes, yet the school system here has elementary schools whose language of instruction is Chinese and Tamil. Some 90% of Chinese kids attend Chinese elementary schools. Would you tolerate such de facto segregation in your schools? Forty plus years after independence, the command of the national language amongst all too many non-Malays remains rudimentary -- should we go for whatever that proposition was in California? And no, it's not just got to do with cultural repression. As the 1960s progressed, enrolment of Chinese kids in English-medium schools increased, while that in Chinese-medium schools declined. Then following 1969, the government decided to carry through with what had been decided as policy back at the time of independence, the conversion of the English-medium schools to the national language medium. That started the increase in enrolment in the Chinese-medium schools, not least becase the national language, Malay, is seen as an inferior language. Today, with Mahathir -- although that may change when he's gone and de-mahathirisation sets in, as it will -- the project of a national language and a national culture, of the early nationalist dream of 'nation-building', has been essentially sidelined, as English makes its comeback, and notions of 'national culture' have been left as a dead letter. We may well yet be the example of that multi-culturalism of globalisation.
Meanwhile, over in Singapore, in the same period, Chinese medium schools were put down -- they had been hotbeds of leftist activity -- and the only Chinese medium university, the Nanyang University, was taken over and converted into English medium. There's since been a revival of Chinese instruction, not least for fear of a loss of 'confucian values', but also for the pragmatic reasons of business with China, but no Chinese university.
In SE Asia, Singapore excepted, Malaysia is the only country where Chinese did not have to change their names -- adoption of Euro-names being a voluntary move -- where Chinese was/is taught, where Chinese newspapers and radio stations and tv programmes exist, where you can walk into a bookshop and have the majority of publications in Chinese, walk into a coffee shop and have the handwritten menus in Chinese, etc. So you don't have a Cojuangco, or a Bob Hasan, or the Thai names of the family that ran the Bangkok Bank.
Attack Mahathir all you wish -- I hold no brief for him, far from it -- but it would be good to have a more nuanced understanding of our condition, and emigres may just not be the best guide to that, nor even the DAP, the main Chinese opposition party, which is currently bent on trying to recapture its electoral support by attempting to revive the sentiments of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. More than anything else, the eclipse of the DAP is a measure of Mahathir's success.
kj khoo