> Hate to do this, but have you spent any considerable time in the
> country or spent any effort to understand why it was that the left
> was defeated and Malaya became the model of a successful
> counter-insurgency, the original source of the idea for strategic
> hamlets, etc.?
And I hate to say I thought this kind of personal argument would appear eventually. "No" to the first question, "yes" to the second. I have also spent a lot of time studying economic history, development theory and comparative public policy. What's your point?
> 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?
Probably none. The history of developing nations over the last 50 years present abject lessons for those Keynesians, Fabians and self-styled Marxists who still think that there are pain-free development schemes.
> 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?
I'm not sure what the point is here.
> 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?
In spite of my surname, I'm neither Chinese nor an emigre, so I have no real insight into this. Obviously the Malaysian economy is growing faster and is a more attractive site for investment in manufacturing (and some other industries) than Australia. Manufacturing here is small, barely growing in absolute terms and shrinking relative to both other sectors and global manufacturing output. Lee Kuan Yew (Uncle Harry --- if not Mahathir --- has been lecturing our ruling class for years about "unsustainable" wages and conditions, militant unions, etc. As if capital chooses to have things that way! But anyway, as they say, everything may change. Union membership here is in slow decline. There is probably a lot of slack to be taken up in the ASEAN labour markets before we see significant conflict between labour and capital in those countries. But as a member of the wage earning class, I have absolutely no doubt about where I'm better of --- for the moment, anyway.
> 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?
Once again, I'm not sure what you're getting at. If by "your" you mean Australia, there are already a multitude of ethnic schools, partially state-funded, in the major cities here. They're not compulsory, so why should anyone have a problem with them?