Life After Ketuanan 我们回来了

What’s to happen to the Chinese after Ketuanan?

Malaysia without the Chinese: is it Malaysia?

Keluar? Sure. Many Chinese now know where to, how and, after Zhao Mingfu, dead or alive makes for little difference…

The Road Home 我们回来了

History left behind the Chinese in Malaysia, their lot thrown in with the Malays (and Indians and the mountain people), so it might be pertinent to go back to history to find a resolution to their present predicament. The other option,  the coming or the going, is never entirely up to the Chinese because they have to undo the process of history. So, when they tell the Chinese to “leave”, the Chinese hear neither arrogance nor intimidation; they hear stupidity. Leaving has always been an option and a viable one, which the Chinese know all along without the need of the Ibrahim of Sabris and Ibrahim of Alis to remind them. They will continue to take steps in that direction (recall the letter from the Malaysian Diaspora Seven?).

Moving a life, however, is not like moving furniture; it takes time, effort and determination. Once the Chinese are out (along with the Indians and the clever, decent Malays), and so leave Malaysia alone to the Ibrahims, they shall from the other shore watch them go down. They have seen it before: when some people or an entire community live on handouts, they eventually wither and pack up with it. The long, long history of the Chinese that a kid might learn in school is one of endurance, stamina, collective effort and mutual help for (surprise?) the individual survival; an essence of Chinese culture is to teach oneself  how to live, how to get a meal to the family, against the odds. It was that way during the reign of King of Zhou, during the time of Kongzi, and it is still that way in Malaysia. Elsewhere, you’ve only to visit the conditions in the Manila slums, in Palembang and in parts of Java to see the extent of their national corrosion in life and in soul, both of which were long ago subsumed and replaced by the Christianity of Spain, the legal institutions of the Americans, the laws of the British, the administrative apparatus of the Dutch and the Islam of the Arabs, yet now adrift without the guide of the north star. Malaysian apartheid may work with different conditions, that is, by a different route, but it delivers the same results.

“The fault, dear Brutus,” Shakespeare once wrote, “is not in the stars that we are underlings.” There, Shakespeare was wrong: people are underlings not because of tian, of course, but it was not in themselves either. This brings to the point Helen Ang has inadvertently raised – the future of the Chinese in Malaysia. Although the matter in her discussion concerns only the Chinese, its outcome (whatever that may be) would affect up to half the country’s population once the status of the Chinese is extrapolated to count in the Indians and the Sarawak and Sabah people.

The Helen Question is straightforward. To repeat, it is: What will be the Chinese like in 30, 50 years on? That question is deliberately rhetorical in order to encompass numerous facets of the Chinese existence to include his constitutional and political positions, economic well-being, and cultural life (language, education, family, traditions, and habits of custom).

One critical assumption underlies that question: the Chinese, without consideration for his existing circumstances, decides his own fate, almost as if arbitrarily and for no good reason. This is of course false and unrealistic. It is false for a number of reasons, but consider two.

The façade of democracy (choosing a government) and the apparent freedom to come and go (given a passport) offer the illusion that the future is in the hands of individuals. But, in numerous constituencies, as many as ten Chinese votes are equal to one Malay vote. Then there is that gerrymandering with electoral boundaries. This is coupled with land, housing, and town-planning policies designed to shift populations on ethnic basis.  Freedom of movement may permit you to leave your home, but not where you end up. Housing policies and employment and education opportunities (which university you go, from whom you may get a job) serve only to curtail movement. A Chinese is more likely than a Malay to grow up in a new village, and less likely to prefer Putrajaya because most of the jobs there are closed to that person. Place names are physical boundary markers. Owning a passport may permit the noodle vendor in Penang a trip to Hatyai for a weekend break and cheap shopping, but that’s as far as it goes. Perhaps the children will have better luck, for example, if they get a university place in Australia but not many qualify and, if they qualify, the tuition is unaffordable. Simply, the obstacles are too many to count – therefore, unrealistic. It is also unrealistic because race politics is already written into the Constitution, so that no amount of sloganeering and breast beating can change that.

If, given those circumstances, the Chinese cannot alone or individually determine their own fate then that question – what will it be like – becomes entirely inconsequential or irrelevant; his fate is already sealed. Somebody, or something, else has decided the future of the Chinese laobaixing, the old man still riding a cart in Batu Gajah and selling tofu deep into the night. He once worked the mine until one man named Mahathir Mohamad played the tin market in London, and lost badly. Nothing has been the same for him since.

Against this pessimism is a countervailing question: If not he himself and if not the stars, who or what then determines his fate? The Helen Question rephrased in this way is therefore answered by answering on the flip side: What will be Umno, the Malays, like in 30, 50 years? This question, oddly enough, is not hard to answer.

Ketuanan Melayu

Coming from Ibrahim Sabri, et al, the Umno hired hands backed by the home affairs minister Hishammuddin Hussein, this doctrine has to be taken not at face value (that is, sloganeering) but as an unstated government and party policy. The doctrinal sources in ketuanan are Islam and the Federal Constitution. Ibrahim for example invokes the ummah, that is, he speaks for the Muslim community so that puts Ridhuan Tee firmly in his camp. He speaks of Malay rights, and there is a plethora of that in the Constitution that singles out the Malays for special mention and treatment but ignores one half of the population, the Orang Asli included.

Alloy the religious and the constitutional positions, the result is ketuanan which, if the Ibrahims are to press further, they could say it is Islamic and indeed its syariah compliant. Hence, to be a good Muslim is to endorse ketuanan – and note that Anwar Ibrahim has not denounced the idea but only skirted it with an amorphous and redundant slogan, Ketuanan Rakyat which is like a gauze-sieve trying to hold the water. PAS, the Islam party, could only respond with the nebulous Ketuanan Islam.

Their common positions are not inconsistent with the ketuanan concept because in the Arab religion it does speak of slaves and free Muslims, infidels and the faithful. This means divisions. The divisions may not be ethnic but then in Malaysia there is barely a difference between ethnicity and religion. All this is to say that segregation, the logical extension of which is supremacy by one group over another, is permissible. Arabs practice it and, as followers of the Arabic religion, the Malays had received from them the instrument to serve the latter’s politics and economics. Why not use it? All the bleating by the Umno opposition that ketuanan is purely sloganeering or a political project is inconsequential. The point is that it is effective – even PAS would rather say nothing or it will risk losing even Kelantan.

A doctrine existing in a vacuum serving no purpose has no legitimacy and is pointless. What then motivates ketuanan (whether it is the ketuanan of Melayu, of Islam or of Umno they make for no difference)? There are probably as many reasons as they are in the post-modern definitions of the Malay, but in the context seen in parliamentary sittings and on street fights, the overarching or overriding theme is the subjugation of another ethnicity. Education, jobs, municipal rules, mortgage interest rates, and where you may sell or not sell pork or build temples are tools of the doctrine. Those are not the end-purposes, which many analysis and much talk have them confused.

Against this doctrinal attempt at subjugation, the options are: (a) you resist, (b) you capitulate (Ridhuan Tee, Khoo Kay Kim) or (c) you mitigate by knuckling down on the knees – to mortify yourself (MIC, Gerakan). The work of political parties like the MCA the last 50 odd years have been to knuckle down, negotiate their way out, and hope for the best, adopting non-existent or invented terms like the “social contract”.

If all that had work, why are the Ibrahims still shouting “keluar” and “ketuanan”? Aren’t the Malays already supreme by the fact of MCA hacks mortifying themselves to Umno? With all the tools of ketuanan at their disposal, even the results are plain for all to see – displacement of the Indians from the estates, Chinese emigration, transfer of equity and management control in entire industrial and agricultural sectors, the man still pushing the tofu cart in Batu Gajah, religious conversions, and after that the Ridhuan Tees and the Khoo Kay Kims stepping up to help them in their ketuanan efforts. What more do they want? Enslave every Chinese child? Turning young Chinese into Ahmad Zahid’s go-go girls who, if not performing on election nights for an Umno candidate, can be made to service the desires of the Ibrahims? How else will they be satisfied? Follow the path taken by Arabs with their black Africans and their imported dark-skinned Bangladeshi labour building oil monuments, glittering hotels for the private use of party princelings, arenas for artificial snow, skiing rings, and palm-lined ponds by the sea for gawking at blond women?

These are not far-fetched visions. If Mahathir Mohamad has his way he would have air-conditioned the entire country, Johor to Perlis, end to end, and which he has started in the middle with Putrajaya and whatever other Jayas there are. Here, however, is the problem: one needs money to subjugate, to be ketuanan, because talk is free so that deploying the tools of education and jobs and of the NEP are absolutely necessary to show to the Malays they are indeed supreme by the mere sight of the material possessions held in their name – cars, highways, bridges, houses, hotels, brothels, Disneyland, airports, palaces…. Razaleigh Hamzah is, of course, right about the oil and the cities build with it but he does not answer, why, why, why?

Here, now, is the problem: Mahathir nearly spent it all (Why and how? Here and here.)  What next then? What’s to become of the ketuanan project?

Before, when ketuanan could be witnessed – that is, to be seen, felt, even to be tasted (naughty you, thinking of go-go girls?) – there was no need to shout. Now it is shouted from the streets. The Ibrahims shouting ketuanan on the streets carry the exact same message as Hishammuddin Hussein kissing a keris in an air-conditioned Umno palace hall. The Ibrahims replace the Hishams, the street replaces the hall, but it is the same ketuanan expressed only in different ways from two different vantage points so that, to go through all this trouble, then there has to be for a reason. And this reason better be worth the trouble because the fire is lit.

As this fire simmers, the palace roofs leak, the air-conditioning cranking to fail, the Mahathir’s bicycle companies sold, the loans are due for redemption, and the Project is yet to be completed. In the meantime the oil tap suddenly trickles money in cupfuls and not anymore in barrels, so ketuanan has to be propped up other means necessary. Thus when ketuanan has to be kissed on the other side of the keris (careful Hisham, don’t cut your tongue) and in private, it’s necessary to un-sheath the doctrine out of sight of Putrajaya. And Shah Alam isn’t such a bad place. Not Kota Baru; the message is not for the Malays only. The louder it is the better because, hopefully, nobody will see the roof leak and the debt collector coming up the driveway. Abdullah Badawi, good but naïve man that he is, couldn’t understand why Malaysia has First World infrastructure and Third World maintenance culture. It wasn’t the culture; it was the purpose, the motive, in building the palaces that was wrong in the first place. Thus, along with the Ibrahims is Plan B: bring back the foreign investors (damned the Arabs, they want to call it Arab City and not Melaka Iskandar Shah Jaya but never mind), a second wave of privatization and “gently” introduce the GST, goods and services tax.

Is the Ketuanan Project in jeopardy, therefore? Hardly, this is only a hiccup: we still have the Ibrahims, the keris is still at home, and we have Plan B. Will all this succeed?

By widening the tax base (the GST), Umno is in essence saying we’ll rally the whole country to the Project but be silent about the latter. And the pudding in the pie of this assertion – Malaysia without money for “development” – has been reaffirmed over and over again, first by MIER (inadvertently), then by the deputy finance minister (also inadvertently when he said Malaysia wasted an entire decade) and now by Razaleigh Hamzah (without his admission). The proof is this: what oil had failed to completely deliver, the Umno government will want the population to stand in its place, to grease the Project as it were. As for the Ibrahims, Umno could speak out from the other side of its mouth and say, pay them no attention, they are a handful of anonymous party hacks, and we don’t know who they are. Really?

If this argument – about oil, the ketuanan, the GST, the new wave of privatization, the Arab City – is valid, then one sees the relaunch of ketuanan by other means. The Malays, once serviced by ketuanan with oil, now they must be serviced with some of their own money, taxes. But what do they pay with? Money needs money to pay.

In the past it used to be free this and free that, and all that was still tax-free, and they could point to the Constitution for the legal justification. In the future, there might be fewer freebies and a tax, unless Bank Negara lends a hand, go into the forex market to try their luck, and the Treasury guarantees all the debts of all its companies, that is, enter into more debt. Mahathirism is back, only with less oil for the Project purpose.

But without the grease of oil, the next round will be accompanied by lots of cranking sounds, murmurs of complaints, and more licensing sales and more demands on the government and on Umno for more contracts, more buildings, more bridges, more palaces, all the while shouting even more ketuanan because the constitutional provisions are used up, they must turn to religion. The Ibrahims of Umno will go out on the streets, wrecking vengeance, shouting, and the other Malays will be tuning in, and soon they’ll be nodding their heads, thinking maybe the Ibrahims are right: it is the fault of the Chinese we are poorer now and we no longer have more cars, more highways, more bridges, more houses, more hotels, more brothels, more palaces, not even one Disneyland, and the airport toilets stink. Did you smell it? No money to pay him for six months the Bangladeshi worker has finally disappeared, somewhere, because he is without his passport and Rela is looking for him.

What will be the Chinese like in 30, 50 years is a question greatly dependent on what will be the Malay like in 30, 50 years. And signs are everywhere of an evolving Malay ketuanan, before underwritten by oil, now by shouting, kissing some crooked dagger and by refurbishing an old economic regime. But the Ibrahims don’t realise that nobody needs to take out a hat for them if no hats were worn: this is how ketuanan awaits them. You want servants and slaves get it from the Ridhuan Tees, the Thomas Lees and the Khoo Kay Kims – they’ll happily help you champion ketuanan, maybe even collect taxes on your behalf.

Keluar? Why not? To the Ibrahims, they’re going to be happier lot after that? If so, wish you a happy retirement. Try retiring into the Arab City, but you may want to first dress up like an Arab (use your bedlinen), otherwise no admission, maybe. Speaking Arabic helps. The Chinese leave you, as the English like to say, in “good” hands. The Chinese never say goodbye because zaihui 再会 literally means meet again. But no thanks. Kamu sudah keluar. If ever you need help from the Chinese, send an email: common people never forget a “debt” or a good turn. Never. That, you see, is also taught in Chinese culture.

The Internet As Tool of Tyranny

Belatedly, to borrow from Nick Cohen at Standpoint:

The overwhelming majority of political writers on the internet do not fact-check allies or warn them that they are making a mistake. Indeed, the standard web author rarely sees the need to spell out what his or her side believes in and argue for it in the marketplace of ideas. Instead, they encourage group loyalty and group-think by denouncing opponents. Free access to content makes the building of tribal identification by ritual jeering at opponents the dominant style. We are so used to it we forget its novelty. A generation ago, a conservative would have been aware that left-wing newspapers contained ideas he found ridiculous or sinister. However, as he would never waste his money buying a copy, he could spend his life in happy ignorance of the specifics. The same applied to liberals with the Tory press. Now it is easy, far too easy, for a blogger to click on an ideological opponent’s site or newspaper and select heretical thoughts to copy and denounce to his allies.

It reminds of Raja Petra’s Malaysia Today, pigsty of mud-raking, old little monkeys, a barbarian horde, stroking each other’s back, shouting down the establishment, and shrieking away when they don’t like what they see. Read? Illiterates don’t know how to read, much less illuminate issues. And they think of themselves as great freedom lovers and democrats. Tian-ah!

It’s Coming Together Now: Oil+GST+Ketuanan+…

Like Najib Razak, Razaleigh Hamzah is also an economist by academic training and has served government in that capacity. Hence, when he writes that oil has been a curse on Malaysia, you know he is saying little – and much of it is political anyway.

Below in graphic form is what he might have omitted:

Chart: Oil, Taxes and the Coming Crunch

Data sources: UUM, Mier, Treasury (warning, all pdf files)

Interpreting the chart.

• Note the trend in the oil production graph line (pink) that would not stop rising until the financial crisis years of 1998-89), and then dips sharply in 2004 because the wells of the 1980s were empty.

• Net exports/imports is total crude production minus local consumption.

• Local consumption patterns have in the last 20 years been flat on a trend, until again 2004.

• Compare the production graph lines (navy blue & pink) and note their increasing, and diverging, distance from each.

• Government operating expenses (red line, right scale) – paying salaries, regular grants, buying stuff, bailing out Mahathir’s companies, and debt service – is one of the two components of federal expense. The other is “development” expense. Adding about 1 billion for every 2 billion in operating, you get about 50pct more and, hence, the total federal expense. Like household bills, transport and food, operating is used because it requires recurring, cash payment, hence regular money income into treasury, 40 pct of which comes from oil and gas.

• The rise in operating expenses started by the tenth anniversary of Mahathir rule, growing even steeper in the last two decades. If Badawi had been (from 2003) spending more than Mahathir it suggests the former inherited the commitments and debts (the GLCs, for example) of the latter. But oil money and tax revenues were insufficient to cover.

• Note that the growth rate in operating expense has since 2005 intersected the graph line for petroleum sales; operating is a runaway train and there is little the train driver can do to stop it.

• The goods and sales tax has roots in those three simultaneous problems, declining oil money, limited tax income, and they on top of a spendthrift government. These are facts acknowledged even by the MIER economists, looking for ways to alleviate a crunch to come. Their ethically justification for GST, a flat rate tax, is that it’s fair – both to the poor and the rich. (This should be a lesson to DAP/PKR: equality opposes justice.)

• Another way out of the crunch is for the government to enter into more debt, which is printing money by other means. It is inflationary. Two possible sources of debt are to borrow in local and/or in foreign currencies. At one time Mahathir borrowed heavily from abroad, but the government has since relied more on local debt issues. The lurking problem is this: Malaysia will eventually, a matter of years, become a net importer of petroleum (blue line) so that more US dollars leave than enter Putrajaya. With this dollar deficit it must turn to foreign debt to service, perversely, existing foreign debts and pay for imports in foreign currencies. (Few people want ringgit. But the renminbi? Precious!)

• Alternatively, Malaysia could lease assets along the entire Malacca Straits, sell to Arabs for their oil dollars the coastline from Johore to Kedah. This has started with the “Arab City” in Malacca. The Arab oil sheikhs are coming and the Star and the NST, in their eternal gratuity, say they bring dollars – what a wonderful thing therefore. Only be careful with your daughters waiting at their tables, and your head on your shoulders – chop, chop. It isn’t just dollars, Malaysia imports from Arabia, but the concept of ketuanan and an entire cultural meliu, wherein Arab ethnic supremacy has in its roots in religion. For verification on this assertion, ask Ibrahim Sabri, defender of the ummah and patronised by the home minister Hishammuddin Hussein, for the source of the ketuanan. (The more Malaysia accelerates to spiral downwards and the faster oil money dries up, the greater is the urgency to prop up Umno, religiously because, materially, they are scrouging around for money to keep the rank and file happy and the Ibrahims paid.)

It is all coming together in the years to come: government, Umno, the NEP, expenses, dollars, oil, taxes, religion and ketuanan. And that is what Razaleigh, limited by speech and Umno membership, have omitted to say.

Helen’s Shrunken Chinese: A Response

不相信未作犧牲竟先可擁有
只相信是靠雙手找到我慾求
每一串汗水換每一個成就

In this I’m certain, there is no gain without sacrifice
For in this pair of hands are my dreams
In every bead of my sweat are triumphs counted

Writing on the effects of Malaysian apartheid on demographic change among the Chinese, Helen Ang attempts to answer the unstated – and unique – question: What will be Malaysian Chinese like 30, 50 years on? (By Chinese, it is fair to assume she means the laobaixing, typically those in the old towns and new suburbs of Johore Baru, Cheras and Bukit Mertajam, people eking out a living from a noodle stand, the fruit vendor, the mechanic and bricklayer rather than the Ridhuan Tees and Khoo Kay Kims, people already well looked after by the Malay government.)

Helen begins with statistics: the absolute Chinese head count had risen but it had fallen sharply in its share of the national population. This fall, from more than a third 50 years ago to 21 pct at present (18 pct in one’s remaining lifetime is projected), is the direct result of three things: emigration, low birth rates, and a deliberate government policy to top up the Malay stock with Filipino Muslims (Sabah, Sarawak) and Indonesian Muslims (Peninsula).

After all that, she attempts to answer another unstated question: What does Malaysian apartheid do to the Chinese? This is where her argument shifts, falters, and falters badly, from politics and demographics to psychology and culture. In her prediction of things to come, she speaks of two psychological forces at work on the Chinese. These may be summarized as follows:

• Collective angst. By this, the Chinese, having lost the ability to determine their own future, will continue to find their lives railroaded instead by a deeply hostile Malay government and population. In this environment they turn selfish. “Self-interest,” Helen wrote, “overrides almost everything else that concerns the welfare of the community.”

• Isolated rootlessness. There is a borrowed word by Helen called “placelessness”. It’s code word for the supposed inability to relate to another community (she single out only the Malays). To be placeless is to be adrift. The reason for this, and it’s the only one she has cited, is that there exists a threshold population for any community to relate to another. Below this threshold, the culture seems to totter then dissipates. Any connection with another community is finally broken, people withdraw into their homes and behind their gates never mind if the thief is coming through the window next door.

Naturally, the two phenomena don’t follow one after the other. Rather, and in a sense, the second appears like an overlapping extension of the first. Helen then uses these characteristics to paint the heart of the Chinese identity so that in her argument comparison is made between what is it to be Chinese, say, in Ulu Kelantan and in Shah Alam. Also, what is it to be Chinese 30 years ago and the Chinese today?

Rolling out such names as Philip Poi and Lee Boon Thong, Helen cites “research” theories: one, to back up her argument on the psychological affliction of Malaysian apartheid on the Chinese; and, two, to give academic credentials to her treatise on the present conditions of the community. Her treatise, therefore, reads as if borrowed from Mahathir Mohamad’s The Malay Dilemma, the two separated only by a span of 30-odd years.

The Dilemma is full of pseudo science, blinkered conjectures, phony analogies, spurious deductions and deceitful opinionated garbage, all passed off as clever, intellectual assessment, and everybody, the glorious Malaysian Press in particular, bought into it without question. Everything, to repeat, everything, has been down hill since.

Helen, for example, makes the case for why the Chinese are “more self-centred, more covetous, less considerate and kiasu to boot.” In the Dilemma Mahathir has said what amounts to the same thing: the Chinese are “self-centred” and “covetous”. Therefore they make shrewd businesses as if this is an ethnic condition. Only the Chinese have it; or, in other words, it is an exclusive Chinese quality.

Then, Helen’s employment of the Fujian transliteration word “kiasu”, used commonly as a point of mockery directed against Singaporean Chinese, reinforces the idea of “placelessness”. Kiasu is a figure of speech with the intrinsic and underlying meaning that what motivates the Chinese forward is the cultural attribute of never accepting second place in life. Once extrapolated from an individual attitude to the community, kiasu means never to lose out to the Malays but Helen forgets, or ignores, that in Singapore the Malays are a minority. In power are the Chinese. Flip now to Malaysia where kiasu, literally the fear of losing (along with other ailments), exacerbates the Chinese condition. Thus, they look inward and are unwilling to relate to the larger, neighbouring Malays. Once again, the burden of dialogue and of developing a harmonious relationship in the country is with the Chinese. That, too, parallels Mahathir’s inflammatory contention: driven by a kiasu psychology, the Chinese contribution to Malaysia is to sit on the heads of the Malays.

Helen’s otherwise perceptive treatise is also negated by dubious conjectures, extrapolating individual lives to the Chinese as a whole – in other words, to take isolated cases, then turning them into intrinsic characteristics, peculiar and distinctive to the Chinese. This is Mahathirism pseudo science. For example, the two contradictory passages follow after each other:

“The Chinese community places great emphasis on education but the escalation in the cost of acquiring an education might have compelled young couples to limit their family size.

Because educated Chinese women are in the workforce as well as limiting themselves to only one or two children, Chinese couples have more money to spend on each child’s education.”

On the one hand, Helen says, priority on education “might” be the cause of a limited family size. On the other, and inverting the chicken-egg causal relationship, she says a small family size permits for higher education.

This is not a trivial incongruity in Helen’s assertion because underlying size is family income, which has been one of Mahathir’s most sinister and deceitful justifications in Malaysia’s institutional construction of apartheid, the NEP being at the forefront. In it, for example, income  measures not wealth ownership (land, farms, buildings) are used for its justification. After this, the NEP erroneously adopts rural and urban prices and income, lumping them together to assert the point that the Chinese are therefore richer although plainly, ten ringgit buys a far less amount of goods in Kuala Lumpur than in Ulu Kelantan. That is, the NEP compared not just ethnic but also demographic classes. It is an error, but probably a deception, that has repeated ever since Mahathir adopted the bogus analogy that because Chinese live in towns they are therefore wealthier (where else are they to live if not towns because Malay reserves are out of bounds and hardly tradeable in the open market and so with little or no collateral value?) This kind of dodgy economics is reinforced by consigning income to per capita household. With a Malay family of five, six children, and the Chinese two or three, the head count conversion will invariably deliver an income rate in which the first will be lower than the second.

In reality, there are many reasons for the Chinese to limit family size. Many of these motivations have nothing to do with education. Against the background of an apartheid environment, against the institutional forces at work, in the privacy of his home, and alone laying bricks under the sun, the Chinese bricklayer also has much time to think. He remembers the pain of growing up, getting up before dawn, hurrying to school, whipped by the teacher, taunted as a greedy Chinaman and clearing tables after school at the mother’s noodle stand. Therein, an entire childhood lost. But he has since stopped worrying about food on the table and must ask the penultimate question: Is this the place I want to raise kids? No, Helen, he will say: Tonight, I’ll have a good fuck but I must be careful. Kafka is right: Coitus is punishment for the happiness of being together.

Numerous high-income societies, Singapore, Japan being pertinent examples, deliver low birth rates. In this pattern, there is a correlation between income and children. But correlation is not causality.

To say the Chinese in Malaysia – out of sense of lost identity, and of pressures to migrate and to live a self-centred life – now constitute a “new society” is to take apart Chinese culture from Malaysian society. This view, very Western, very materialistic (because it says material existence, food, etc, is the final arbiter of culture), buys into Umno’s politics that the root and the rock of Malaysian society is an all-Malay culture. Everything else is in the periphery, mere furniture and decoration for a Visit Malaysia Year 2007. There is no Malaysian culture without Chinese culture; this much is never even acknowledged.

True, the Chinese will lose, politically and economically, as they have been losing. But, how are you kiasu then if you have already lost? Migration out of Malaysia is the only option because the bricklayer, alluded to earlier, is up against not just against the likes of the Shah Alam cow gang, the Malay polity, but against the Federal Constitution that pins him down because of skin colour. If the bricklayer can’t make it, he wants to be sure his only son has a fair shot at it.

Since there is a constitution, the Chinese had lost (so too the Indians), if only materially and politically. If, because of these losses, the soul is gravely hurt – this view is at the heart of Helen’s contention – then the underlying assumption says Chinese social values are written only on the savings passbook. Fence up the Chinese, print “non-bumi” on the page cover, he becomes selfish and covetous. The root into this kind of thinking harks back to the biblical Western conception that the body and “soul” are two inter-related parts of a human: tinker with one affects the other. Helen, more than she realises it, is an Anglophile.

Be that as it may …

If, to go along with Helen’s body-soul argument, the Chinese lost, then the biggest losers are the Malays. They would have lost the two critical parts of their constitutional definition, namely Malay custom and language, to the third part, an invidious Arabic Islamist culture. That culture, in which the religion of the Arabs is the only arbiter, does not tolerate the pre-Islamic soul or body. Rather it consumes the Malay past, rendering it irrelevant, supplanting it then chewing it into dust. This process has now come a full circle in, for example, Mohd Ali Rastam’s invitation to the Arabs to build an Arab City in Malacca. This is what Hesham El Din Fathi Mohamed of Golden Corporate Heritage answered in response to the red-carpet treatment he received earlier this year from Ali: “We consider Malaysia as our country.” (That , Malaysia our country, was no typo.) How so? Because the Malays are Muslims, which is to infer that what is yours is “ours” – get it?

For a foreigner coming 500, 600 years later than the Chinese, and then to claim Malaysia as “our country” is to make a political statement of sovereignty, an arrogant claim. This is how Arabic Islamism is so invasive. Few Chinese, even among those arriving in Malacca before the Sumatrans and the Portuguese, would assert such a claim not because it is not within their rights but because it is uncouched. At most, he will say, Malaysia belongs to everybody. Among other Chinese (Namewee for example), they will assert that Malaysia is “home” because Chinese Confucian culture puts politics and economics subservient and secondary to the purpose of identity and of belonging, or “placeness”, the word Helen used. (She has to read Mengzi to know what Confucian culture is.)

Hence, in emigrating, the Chinese leaves home, not merely a country, because in the relationship of ruler-to-ruled (one of five cardinal principles), there is family injustice and there is manifested failure of the patriarch ruler disowning his kin. This view is more than seeing the green pasture in Australia or the UK. Few Malays understand such a Confucian notion, much less realize that it is the Chinese who, unwittingly and with little influences here and there, have for centuries help keep the original Malay identity intact by standing up to Wahhabism. (Note, for example, the baju kurung worn among Chinese. In contradiction, the Arab religious ideology is so total it insists the Malays give up their padi-land clothes to wrap them up in sheets of bedlinen, white for men, black for women.) Against the advances of Arabic hegemony, those constitutional aspect of the originating Malay identity – thought processes, language and social values – have lost much ground. It is to be expected. Against a formally structured and invasive Arabic religious culture, the original culture of the Malay archipelago is survived only in museums and in a couple of Javanese and Sumatran pieces reserved for tourists. Having sponged on and taken over  by this set of values, is it any wonder, the Malay polity, as is often spoken through Utusan, should deploy the same power against those who are not yet a Ridhuan Tee?

That, in essence, undergird the question Helen is searching for in her treatise: What will be the Chinese like in the future? So far they have survived. A reported conversation between Nik Aziz of PAS and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew is illustrative. Nik Aziz, ignorant and naïve to the fact he is now subservient to a foreign culture, had expressed his hope that more Chinese will look towards Islam as a source of values. Kuan Yew’s reported answer: The Chinese have resisted conversion since Genghis Khan, 1,700 years ago. Why should they do it now?

What then is it that keeps the Chinese intact against the array of hostilities, long ago Mongolians who themselves have capitulated to Turkmen, today PAS, the cow-head gang, Ibrahim Ali, et al?

That answer is the primer to answering the question raised at the outset: What will be the Chinese be like in 30, 50 years on? To see the reason for Chinese cultural resilience is to first understand what is Chinese culture. As evidence into this resilience – testament to the oldest continuous civilization on earth – revert to Razaleigh Hamzah, a Kelantanese who is Malay more than he is PAS, an exemplary Malay. In an August 2009 lecture at Melbourne University he told of this little story:

In my own parliamentary constituency, jungle covered, far inland and one of the most remote in the peninsula (it used to be known as Ulu Kelantan and covered half the state, and when I started there I had to travel to it by boat), is a six hundred year old Chinese community, perhaps the oldest in the peninsula, living in peace with their Malay and Orang Asli neighbours.

Six hundred years ago and still Chinese, whereas 600 years later many Malays today are more Arabic than Malay. Chinese history is replete with examples of common people resisting tyrants of all sorts, Mongols and bad emperors before, today Umno’s political gangs for hire. Central to its cultural ability to hold the seams is Confucianism, which even communism in China failed to dislodge. The essence of Chinese culture, or Chineseness (chauvinism in the words of the Bangsa Malaysia types), was never, and still is not, dependent on counting noses. This is where Helen erred.

As for those urbanized Chinese, the self-centered, the covetous that she alludes to, they are the Ridhuan Tees, the Khoo Kay Kims, the Siew Engs, and the Thomas Lees – in whom Chinese culture is conflated with Anglo-Saxon values. Life is either centred on the self, which is evil, or on god which is good: another false dichotomy. And this, Helen may not know, is why they – the Tees and Lees – are hardly Chinese in the true sense of the adjectival word. They are Chinese only in their Anglicized names, mangled out of three Chinese characters that leave them completely befuddled. This runs parallel to the same mistaken notion that the Malays today are the Malays of the P. Ramlee days or, to stretch the argument, of the pre-independence sultanates. No longer. For proof in the difference 100 years later (which means the constitutional Malay definition is now outdated), visit Malacca when Javanese girls will have to speak Arabic and wait at an Arab City table. The Malay ruling elite is so badly mistaken they won’t know what’s going to hit them when the day comes. And “our” country with it.

The Ridhuan Tee in Khoo Kay Kim

Of Chinese Schools and Copycats: The Racist History of a History Prof

Below, China Press report picked up from Reuters, and thus spake Khoo Kay Kim:

死背沒創意不值得取經

華小只出抄襲人才

他說，華小的教學制度，製造了一批批專門“抄襲”的畢業生，他們厲害之處，不外是將口袋式的牛津字典生詞，背個滾瓜爛熟。

“這批學生缺乏創意。請看看本地的華校子弟，有多少個是知名的科學家，或會研發產品？”

[In translation...]

Headline:

Rote learning stifles creativity, knowledge progress

Chinese primaries are mere copycats

The two key passages:

He (Khoo Kay Kim) said teaching in the Chinese schools system produces classes of graduates dedicated to plagiarism, awesome in this respect, but are nothing more than an Oxford dictionary pocket issue trawled inside out.

“These students have no creativity. Look at the Chinese school children, how many are famous scientists or can innovate on products?”

(By the same token: “Look at the Manglish school children, how many are famous scientists or can innovate on products?”)

In tone and in substance, Khoo Kay Kim speaks like a janitor, spending his entire career scrubbing toilet bowls, bitter at the world for his third-rate mind, and he then goes around looking for someone or some people to blame.

Still, to answer his question, using a sample list:

Famous scientist from Chinese schools:

• Yang Zhenning, Nobel Physics Prize (for particle physics), 1957, born Anhui, studied in Beijing, able to recite to Khoo (who will not understand) nearly the entire text of Mengzi (孟子) from memory;
• Tsui Chee, Nobel Physics Prize (for quantum mechanics), 1998, born Henan, rote learned Chinese classics, attended Pui Ching school, and migrated to Taiwan;
• Kao Kuen, Nobel Physics Prize (fibre optics), 2009, born Shanghai, studied Chinese classics by rote learning, taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

As to product innovators, consider:

• Lim Goh Tong, born Fujian, creator of Genting, and speaks no English;
• Li Ka-shing, speaking worse than Manglish but owns Canada’s Husky Oil,
• Taiwanese Chang Yung-fa, speaking no English, founder Evergreen Group which literally invented container box shipping in Asia.

When Khoo Kay Kim declares that the Chinese education system in Malaysia produces “copycat” students (because of rote learning), the statement is not an opinion. That judgement, his conclusion, has either to be true or false. It is either an objective, verifiable fact or it is not. There is nothing in between because to call someone a copycat is to say that he copies, he plagiarizes, for he is incapable of sound or innovative thinking. In short, the copycat is stupid.

So how does Khoo, who has never for a single day sat in a Chinese school, know that it produces copycats? Reuters has much to answer for this because they asked for Khoo’s judgement, and on what credentials?

(In July when the government announced that science and maths would give up English as a language medium and revert to mother tongue, this is what Reuter’s reporter David Chance wrote: “Neighbouring Singapore split from becoming part of Malaysia and retained English as the primary language of education. The city state has emerged as one of the richest nations on earth with a per capita income of $51,649 in 2008 while Malaysia’s is $14,225, based on 2008 data.” Chance says nothing of Japan, wealthier than Singapore and uses no English, while the Philippines, four times poorer than Malaysia, is full of English speaking nannies and servants that it exports.)

This is the sort of imbecile intellect produced by the Anglo-Saxon education system, with reporting that is repeated and copied in the Utusan, Star, Malaysiakini and so on. Khoo is asked for his judgement because he is teacher of history and he is Chinese, as if skin colour and English and Malay language competency makes him an expert on education, and Chinese education at that. Regardless….

To be considered true that Chinese classes produce copycats Khoo has to arrive at the judgement either by observation with logical reasoning or by evidential fact. The first is easy and straightforward.

Malaysia, as late as the 1970s, has four language types of education. Now it is down to three. If Chinese education produces copycats, another system must be producing great innovators. Which is, any or all of the three – Malay or Tamil or English? Who are these great thinkers, great business innovators from the Malay or English schools? Who? Mahathir Mohamad? Or, Khoo Kay Kim himself (he pats himself on the shoulders)?

Here is the second method to see if what Khoo says is true or false, that is by evidential fact. Before that, there is a preceding question. When is a person a copycat and when not? One obvious way is to test the person’s literacy. But test what? How about science and mathematics because those are Khoo’s criteria for calling Chinese language graduates stupid. More to the point, the subjects require strong analytical skills in reasoning (deduction and induction) and logical thought (stringing together a coherent idea from disparate facts or quantities).

In the club of the richest, most scientifically advanced and developed countries known as the OECD, they conduct a periodic assessment into how well they teach their students. This is not good enough when  you test your name’s sake because there’s no benchmarking. Hence, they took their assessment worldwide, and this is named the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA – What is PISA?).

PISA uses the same OECD questions but in different languages to test individual students mostly age 15 because that is the end of the compulsory education for most countries. Age 15 education varies among countries but it is at the end of Form Three or Level Three Secondary in countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea. The assessment is done every three years, each time testing between 4,500 to 10,000 students per country, depending on participation levels and population size. The first global testing was in 2000, followed in 2003 and in 2006 when 57 countries took part (Malaysia did not). Recall that testing is uniform on three levels of literacy in mathematics, science and reading.

Here are the PISA 2006 partial results, released in 2008, in ranked order of 57 countries using mean scores from the test:

Science/Mean Score	Maths/Mean Score	Reading/Mean Score
Finland 563	Chinese Taipei 549	Korea 556
HK-China 542	Finland 548	Finland 547
Canada 534	HK-China 547	HK-China 536
Chinese Taipei 532	Korea 547	Canada 527
Estonia 531	Netherlands 531	New Zealand 521
Japan 531	Switzerland 530	Ireland 517
New Zealand 530	Canada 527	Australia 513
Australia 527	Macao-China 525	Liechtenstein 510
Netherlands 525	Liechtenstein 525	Poland 508
Liechtenstein 522	Japan 523	Sweden 507
Korea 522	New Zealand 522	Netherlands 507
Slovenia 519	Belgium 520	Belgium 501
Germany 516	Australia 520	Estonia 501
United Kingdom 515	Estonia 515	Switzerland 499
Czech Republic 513	Denmark 513	Japan 498
Switzerland 512	Czech Republic 510	Chinese Taipei 496
Sweden 503	Ireland 501	OECD average 492
OECD average 500	OECD average 498	Austria 490

Note especially Malaysia’s near and far neighbours clustered above the OECD averages, Japan and Korea, but in particular Hong Kong and Taiwan. Note also the absence of the US and Indonesia, which also participated, and the UK, birthplace of the English school system in Malaysia. Excepting for science, UK student reading and maths literacy is in the bottom half, below OECD average, while Indonesia is as close to the bottom of the pile as it can get in all three categories. (The original 2006 PISA report, executive summary, website contents ).

Taiwan – No 1 in Maths and No 4 in Science – is particularly noteworthy for Malaysia where local Chinese schools are modeled after Taiwan’s. Why? Because most Chinese school graduates, denied admission to Malaysian and equivalent Anglo-Saxon universities, have, until recent years, only Taiwan, identical, cheap and accessible, to get a tertiary education.

Hong Kong is a more interesting case to see if Chinese education produces copycats. It has two language streams of education, two-thirds in Chinese and the rest, a legacy of the colonialism, in English. Of about 5,000 students who took part in Hong Kong, they split the results farther, separating those from the English and Chinese language mediums. The Chinese schools scored higher in all the subjects, in science, maths and reading literacy. This is to also say the English schools brought down the Hong Kong mean score (Hong Kong executive summary report, in English).

Here then is the last question to answer: how are students taught in Chinese schools in Malaysia, Taiwan and Hong Kong? Khoo, again for a man who has never stepped into such a classroom, says the schools adopt rote learning, that is, they use little or nothing else except strict memorization. This is a popular, and common, Malaysian Anglophile and Western perception, when in passing Chinese schools they hear students reading aloud from some text.

This view has two interconnected assumptions – how Anglophiles such as Thomas Lee (heaven forbids, another journalist) arrived at them belies understanding, so that says much about the idiot quality of high school graduates delivered by the St John’s and St Xavier’s.

One assumption equates reading aloud, which is recitation, to rote learning. The other assumption is that rote learning, by which they mean committing text to memory, will produce idiots. This is akin to the astonishingly perverse conclusion made by one minister who says that Malaysians should eat more seafood because it makes a person brainy. He goes on to cite examples of North Sea countries and Japan but ignores Fiji, Vanuatu and the likes that are belly full of fish guts. And, it is also akin to the David Chance of Reuters implying that English made Singapore rich, yet the poorer Malaysia wants to abandon English.

Back to Chinese schools … what do Chinese students recite? And, on what subject? Why does Chinese language learning begins with recitation? Why is recitation necessary and is used as early as the Tang dynasty, 1,500 years ago? Do the schools use recitation in all subjects, maths and science especially? And, besides, what’s wrong with committing text to memory? In maths, multiplication tables are committed to memory for the reason a single principle in multiplication governs the entire table so there is no necessity to repeat why the answers to 2 x 2 and 25 x 25 are derived from the same principle.

No answers will be provided to those questions (why make wise the idiots?). They are asked merely to suggest that it behooves on Khoo Kay Kim to investigate farther, as did the Ministry of Education with its proposal to upgrade the standards of primary teaching nation-wide and across all languages. No, instead, Khoo Kay Kim draws on his taximan’s view of what goes on into Chinese education. So it is not just that he is wrong, fallacious and false in his judgement, but why?

For that question, we have to go back to Khoo’s personality and background, that is, his motivation. On Chinese education, he has rarely, if ever, uttered an academically impartial or even a mildly interested view of examining the nature and the qualities of Chinese education. Rather, everything he has said on the matter has been deliberately vile; before, he would say it is inferior and now he says it is stupid. Why?

Who knows? Perhaps, as a child he was taunted in school, almost certainly in the St John’s or St Xavier’s environment, being labeled a Chinaman kid. Then, at home his mother beat him up so badly that, ultimately, he turned against the motherland – the language, the schools, the culture – blaming it for his humdrum life and banal sufferings.

In the Anglo-Saxon culture and language, however, he saw a halo instead and, better yet, in it a method to repudiate his ethnicity and to spit on his forefathers in contradiction to the Chinese notion, as well as other cultures, that the ancestors are the only available source of comfort and values. Beside, where else does one find fertile ground for beating up on the Chinese; in Malaysia it is a national hobby and a political profession. Thus, against a dominant Malay polity, Khoo Kay Kim found the Chinese easy to pick on. He wouldn’t dare say the same thing of the Malay language schools.

Like the Thomas Lees of The Star, the Nathaniel Tans and the Siew Engs of Malaysiakini, Khoo’s St Xavier type education and personal prejudices helped convert him to the cause of Sinophobic racism – yellow on the outside, white on the inside, wherein everything about the Chinaman is stupid, the English-educated class is clever. Khoo Kay Kim may not have graduated as a copycat but the Manglish schools in Malaysia churn out imbeciles by the tons. And in him is exemplary proof.

His personal past is of no importance to society, of course. The larger consequences arise once he gives interviews (he fits the Reuters, Anglophile agenda so neatly), sits on the human rights commission named Suhakam and when he teaches. Imagine him as human rights commissioner answering a case involving Malays on the one side and Chinese on the other. Or, if he were teaching, imagine then yourself, say, Chinese from a Chinese school and he is grading. You’re finished. You see, Khoo is a Chinese version of Umno racism; he is the Ridhuan Tee without the Mohamed so that with him teaching it is small wonder the local universities are in such a bad shape: racism reinforced by imbecile professors. Or, imagine him as mentor to students; as the popular saying goes, may tian deliver us from the likes of him.

POSTSCRIPT

Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and Khoo Kay Kim are of the same generation, graduating from Singapore, learning English and growing  up with the same jaundiced view of the Chinese. Here, however, Lee confesses that in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s he, as prime minister, got wrong Singapore’s language policy that undermined the Chinese language. “But I will get it right if I live long enough,” he now says.

The prediction (cited here) is that Chinese language in SE Asia’s future will be, like English for British colonialism, riding on the backs of China’s economic advances and not as a cultural carrier. This view is, of course, erroneous; language in whatever circumstances and generation is always a carrier of culture. You have only to watch the antics of the Anglophiles, the Khoo Kay Kims and the Thomas Lees, for evidences in the influence of English on their thoughts and prejudices. In contradiction, see this in the life of one John Chen who makes taco for a living.

Science/Mean Score                Maths/Mean Score                        Reading/Mean Score

Finland 563                       Chinese Taipei 549                          Korea 556

Hong Kong-China 542                Finland 548                                        Finland 547 (2.1)

Canada 534                        Hong Kong-China 547                        Hong Kong-China 536

Chinese Taipei 532        Korea 547                                        Canada 527

Estonia 531                        Netherlands 531                              New Zealand 521

Japan 531                           Switzerland 530                                              Ireland 517 (3.5)

New Zealand 530        Canada 527                                        Australia 513

Australia 527                    Macao-China 525                           Liechtenstein 510

Netherlands 525                Liechtenstein 525                          Poland 508

Liechtenstein 522        Japan 523                                        Sweden 507

Korea 522                           New Zealand 522                       Netherlands 507

Slovenia 519                      Belgium 520                                   Belgium 501

Germany 516                    Australia 520                                   Estonia 501

United Kingdom 515                Estonia 515                                        Switzerland 499

Czech Republic 513                Denmark 513                                   Japan 498

Switzerland 512                        Czech Republic 510                     Chinese Taipei 496

Sweden 503                       Ireland 501                                        OECD average 492

OECD average 500 OECD average 498                         Austria 490

The Lost Generation: Chin Peng, Vohrah & the Muhyiddins

The continuing fight for what is it to be Malaysian:

from the jungles to the courtrooms.

———————————-

Updating for the record, Dec 1:

Malaysian out-migrants totalled 304,358 between Mar 2008 and Aug 2009, that is, a period immediately after the March  general elections. The number averages 16,000 a month compared with 11,000 monthly in all of 2007, a 45 percent rise. A migrant, typically of voting age, does not equal forsaking citizenship but merely to change physical residence, for whatever reason. Inferences from the rate jump:

• Migrants are more likely to vote Pakatan Rakyat (PR) than Barisan but left after the vote.
• They are unlikely to be present to vote PR again, suggesting individual/personal concerns supersede the prospect of a Pakatan in Putrajaya, a prospect they might have given up.
• Either one of the trio or all, PKR, PAS and DAP, don’t inspire confidence (in spite of Malaysiakini). Or worse, Lim Kit Siang’s “tsunami” was a freak, so many PR ADUNs will have to soon find a real job … or, if they have no scruples, get rich quick. But Sassy has two seats, one an insurance; poor Eli, she almost lost hers, prematurely; and Jeff? Sigh … back to no-money blogging.

———————————-

Writing in the Nut Graph about the court’s refusal to permit Chin Peng back to Sitiawan in Perak, Koh Lay Chin was right in saying that all the arguments over the latter’s return were pure emotional claptrap. There is worse. Some, like Ahirudin Attan (Rocky’s Bru) calling Chin Peng the “butcher of Malaya”, were calculated to be false, malicious and vicious. Take out any of the emotions, and Rocky’s snake tooth, Koh’s only plank to support Chin Peng’s return rests purely on the 1989 Hatyai peace treaty, that “a deal is a deal is a deal”. But that, too, is what the government in deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin is saying: Chin Peng couldn’t prove he is the Malaysian part of the deal. “Sorry Chinaman, you are not yet Malaysian.”

In the message of the duo, Ahiruddin and Muhyiddin, they carry the same ultimate purpose: one group decides the fate in another, only the excuses are different. Indeed, the Hatyai deal, granting the return of all former communists, says it is applicable to Malaysians and Malaysians only.

Chin Peng: the Confucian son who must be worthy as a Malaysian subject, pleading to a stone-deaf ruler in heaven.

However, Chin Peng in the courts without a birth certificate to prove nationality is easily remedied, if proof is indeed needed. A search of NRD will do the job, for example (but the government is not interested to search). Furthermore, the government has tacitly recognised Chin Peng as Malaysian by signing the Hatyai treaty and Baling before that; all deals were with the Malayan Communist Party, not the Russian Bolsheviks.

The courts, being “technical” in dwelling on a birth certificate, had acted purely to neutralise the justification of jus soli (right by birth of soil). This is also to say that the courts dismissed the claim of jus soli once Chin Peng could not prove Sitiawan birth – and not the only way around, that is, Chin Peng was born in Sitiawan and was therefore entitled to jus soli treatment.

Chin Peng’s case is illustrative in the nature of being Malaysian. In him is an entire racial agenda written of, and going back, to Malaysia’s birth,  creation, and its constitutional roots. More than that, it speaks of a clear cultural disconnect between Malays and Chinese, with the British wedged between and widening the differences.

Begin with the idea of jus soli and its alternative known in Latin as jus sanguinis, which is right of blood. Spain carries an extreme of the latter principle: a person born in Peru to a parent whose ancestors arriving 500 years earlier from Spain to plunder and conquer, to get rich, is entitled to Spanish nationality. No distinction is placed on birthplace or how far removed is ancestry. Many Caucasian countries, Germany and Turkey for example, introduced such jus sanguinis immigration laws purely on this basis of biological lineage after empire building placed many other ethnic groups within their sovereignty but some of their kin outside the empire’s boundaries. America, Australia, Canada, all lands of immigrants, could not, naturally enough, use jus sanguinis; hence jus soli for these countries.

Malaysia, the Peninsula in particular, is also a land of immigrants but why had it not adopt the jus soli principle? The British had much to answer for this anomaly, but it owes to the reality that White rulers were talking largely to their coterie of Malay chiefs who have no inclination to recognise right of soil and, also because jus soli might give many brown and yellow skins access to British nationality. On the other hand, few Chinese or Indians understood issues of sovereignty in those days – most have no land to fight over – much less are they interested in politics or governance. In practice, though, present-day Malaysian citizenship policy appears to lie somewhere between jus soli and jus sanguinis. Choosing from either and granting it to a citizenship applicant depends, of course, on the skin colour that stands before the immigration officer.

Note that Chin Peng’s court appeals did not rest on the jus sanguinis principle. If he did, then the birth certificate would be of minor importance because the proof is in blood relationships not in a physical place of residence. This raises the question, why didn’t he? That question has no answer for the obvious reason there is also no definitive answer to the question: what makes a Malaysian? Under the light of this question, being Chinese or Indian is even more disadvantageous because of skin colour, lineage, parentage and because of culture. Unlike the term ‘Malay’ (recall that Indonesians don’t call themselves Malays), Chinese and Indians are not even named in the Constitution, therefore outside of the formal and official recognition that go with legal status and citizenship, which is given today with almost no questions asked to Indonesians and to Filipino Malays from the Muslim south.

Given the legalism, Chin Peng is therefore reduced to only one critical point of argument: jus soli.

But to grant Chin Peng the jus soli right – even without invoking a birth certificate – is to open the flood gates to immigrants: imagine a million male immigrants, Burmese, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indonesian Christian Malays, Melanesians, Polynesians, (not to mention all the loinclothed tribal Kalimantan people so reviled by PAS and Hadi Awang) adding a million women more to their ranks and then three million babies after that. And a generation later, what if they were to negate local-born Malays as the sole dominant political power? How will Umno members permit Malaysia to be turned into a mini USA and thereafter permit an immigrant half-black Barack Obama to be prime minister? Or worse, in their imaginations, Ketuanan Melayu diluted by Bangladeshis and Pakistanis? (In this regard, present-day ethnic Chinese, especially from Taiwan and mainland China, hardly find Malaysia an attractive place to immigrate – hot, sticky, and Third World. This is in spite of Umno politicians, those BTN propagandists, as well as the Anglophile and Malay media making a big deal of the land, erroneously, as if every Chinese covets their mosquito-infested jungle property.)

The deep-rooted problem in Chin Peng’s case isn’t only because he is Chinese but because, underlying the political ramifications of his trial claim, is an existential one: when is a Malaysian a Malaysian? When he stops calling himself Chinese? Or Malay or Indian? (This is also to explain why the Bangsa Malaysia mob, their noble intentions notwithstanding, doesn’t ever seem to get it: equal right citizenship does not define Malaysian identity, and so the problem is fundamental in ways that a label does not solve.)

Answers to existential, or philosophical, questions are never found in law. For this reason alone, Chin Peng should not have gone to the courts. His purpose for returning (read his interview in the translated Sin Chew article) was purely cultural and personal: he wanted in the remaining months or years of his life to do his “duty” as a son; note, not as father (his son and daughter had visited him in Bangkok) or as a communist. This is to say he wanted some time to be in the presence of his dead parents in Sitiawan and to visit their graves. In satisfying this duty, which is wholly Confucian, he must appeal to a ruler that, paradoxically, understands no, absolutely no, Confucianism.

To the Malay bureaucracy and to the Anglophile Press, both completely deaf and ignorant to a fellow culture, the idea of filial duty would seem pedestrian, an old man’s hang-up. But coming from Chin Peng, a Chinese, it is steeped in ethics. His parents would have died without him present, or at the wake. He must now remedy the failure. From this point of view, the government’s answer to his dilemma is to grant him a temporary, say, year-long residence permit and to hell with the contradiction that you don’t grant residency rights to your own citizens.

Muhyiddin: Chin Peng to him was deeply coloured in red, but he couldn’t tell what kind of a red.

Worse than breaking its word on the Hatyai treaty, the government is actually reneging on the Constitution that automatically grants to all residents, local or foreign born prior to 1957, an open and through road to claim citizenship. Muhyiddin, and Umno by extension, could readily win the hearts of every Chinese if he were to address Chin Peng’s public plea and offered him a way out, even if the right is his to claim, constitutionally; rather, it is in cognizance of his filial obligation, that is, in recognition of his identity, his culture. (Sin Chew uses the English word “humanitarianism”, but this misses the Confucian nuances in the deep and mutual obligations between ruler and subject). In this way the government would be seen not only as a benevolent ruler but also the act would help it score political points, possibly win elections, without having to spend a cent, or promise another PKFZ project to MCA, or worry over future birthright and citizenship claims. It is, truly, that simple.

But, for Umno politicians expending their entire careers on fictitiously defending Malay rights, what do they understand of Confucian culture? Here, then, a supposedly multiracial government who does not know its own people, or an inherited culture. This is unbelievable, akin to saying that the Greek government does not know Socrates of Plato. Instead, like Ahirudin frothing from both sides of the mouth, they yell at shadows in the cave, on the one side demanding Chinese allegiance to Malaysia while in another tongue shouting ‘no’ and ‘balik Cina’ to the Chinese in Chin Peng to be Malaysian. This is Bangsa Malaysia forked-tongue speech in the extreme that treats, unquestioningly, loyalty by Indonesian Malays (Ahirudin) or quasi-Malays (Mahathir Mohamad) as automatic.

All that is to be expected, of course: Malaysia’s fundamental problem, today transplanted into Chin Peng’s legal battles, public pleas, and Ahirudin’s venomous spit, is not the lack of democracy, nor the failure to stick to the Constitution, and so there’s deprivation to say anything you like – freedom. It is not even in the race and religious barriers (whatever they are) that KC Vohrah, the former judge, said were divisively constructed “wittingly or unwittingly … in the last 20 to 30 years”.

Vohrah: How would he judge Chin Peng? Jus soli or jus sanguinis, both or neither?

Such kind of talk may be well-meaning criticisms but they are wrong from the first letter on. Suppose those barriers were torn down by the next generation, what then? Removing such social divisions, the NEP for example, treat the outward symptoms of a moribund, dysfunctional society that had allowed them to be constructed in the first place. This construction can only mean that the roots of a divided polity were there, in existence, fomenting, spreading and gathering pace until the likes of one Mahathir comes along to whip it out – the so-called “Merdeka contract” for example – in order to put Chinese and Indians in their places.

The mistakes in seeing the past for what it represents, or misrepresents, today are everywhere. Thus, Vohrah spoke romantically about the past and that there was “no issue of being treated differently because we were of different races”. Really?

Both in the eighties, Vohrah and Chin Peng belong to the same generation, the exact same age group. If the sun had shone so brightly in their days, and all were happy and contented, how did one end up in the jungles, live now in exile, and reviled as a “butcher” while the other is praised as a “respected” judge, evidently contented in his retirement? If Vohrah is sitting as judge, how would he rule on Chin Peng? Malaysians, especially the pre-Merdeka ruling class, are wont to speak, self-servingly, of the glorious past and so perpetuate the fiction that in it are the secrets to a happy future when, to the contrary, past events must actually have a bearing on the ugly present.

Malaysia turned in on the wrong page of history, stepping out on the wrong foot, so that the remedy must start with the past, the Constitution in particular. The reasons to a divided Malaysia is fundamentally philosophical in origins, not political and certainly not economic nor ideological. Until this is recognised, all the romanticism won’t change a thing. Chin Peng will die alone in Bangkok while the moneyed and the ruling elites, the urban chattering class, the Anglophiles, the Ahirudin apologists will quietly dispatch emails to family and kin in Australia: we lost your birth certificate, we’ve no proof, don’t come back, you can’t die in Malaysia, we are not yet a Malaysia.

GST: The Taxation of Politics & Umno’s Next 50 Years

Pass the hat…

When, during his prime minister tenure, Abdullah Badawi scrapped or put on hold some of the billion ringgit federal projects initiated under Mahathir Mohamad’s reign, the latter fumed beneath his tongue. “It’s not that we don’t have the money,” Mahathir reportedly said, but softly. “We have the money.”

Of course, ‘they’ have the money: Mahathir should know, for he speaks from experience after all. But he was also speaking from retrospect, that is, at a point in the past, his past, when the oil wells of the South China Sea never seemed to cease flowing, so US dollar money came in by the barrels to ‘his’ government, and also because Putrajaya need not pay for many of the public tasks of infrastructure works. Infrastructure works passed on to private companies were ways, other than tax, to make everybody pay for sewerage (good for Indah Water), road (good for Proton, UEM), and all social goods. Malaysia Inc. was, thus, god-sent: money in, little money out.

Spared of the expenditures, what to do with government money? With a country at his feet and with many tongues to appease – thus, new towns, new ports, and so on – the splurge would never stop. It wasn’t just with the NEP; it was the NEP’s administrator that began spending on crutches, the name to which have two Ps. They are called petroleum and privatization. (The oil and gas off Trengganu are pumped, literally, into Putrajaya; there is such a pipeline network.)

Total revenues to Putrajaya (aka Umno-Barisan Nasional) is going to total 148 billion ringgit in 2010, down 8pct from 162 billion this year (see Treasury 2010 accounts data; warning, PDF). In the global scheme of things, these figures are paltry. Yearly revenues at Wal-Mart, the US retailer, exceed 350 billion, US dollars (or roughly 1,300 billion ringgit), and that without it relying on a drop of oil.

Of federal government revenues, Petronas is singularly critical. Dividend itself provides 30 billion ringgit in 2009, royalty gave 5 billion, for a total 21 pct share of federal revenues. Count in other oil companies (Shell, Esso, etc), petroleum taxes added another 27 billion, or 16 pct. All in (adding things like customs duties), the oil business gave four of every 10 ringgit that the government takes in as its income.

Dependence on petroleum isn’t such a bad thing in itself even if the thing greases; the Anglophile legacy among the St John’s types always manages somehow to associate money with morality. No, evil has roots not in money but in Eden, specifically a tree there. (When oil prices rose beyond USD100 a barrel, oil companies that were fearfully of inundating banks with their cash – recall all deposits are liabilities on the balance sheet – promptly redistributed the surplus money. For example, an oil platform technical staff paid 10,000 ringgit receives instant gratification, no questions asked, upwards of 3 times the month’s pay). So, the dilemma with oil money comes with its uses, not collection.

Using money is hardly a profound idea, for there are many ways to skin the cat. How will the money build future productive capacity? Create more jobs? These are vital matters because increased capacity and more jobs will also mean, to the government that’s on the other side of the national income equation, future streams of revenue. In tax jargon, this is widening the tax base and redistributing it away from the finite thing called oil.

Mahathir, licensed as a doctor with only a taximan’s understanding of economics, build monuments on oil. His approach to governance and politics was as a salesman of snake oil, not as junzi 君子 to whom public service must be a philosophical exercise in proven human virtues. So you could get away with peddling to an oil snakeman from spinning stories of gold-paved roads and mansions in heaven. Mahathir was always gullible without him knowing it, so his coterie of advisers, whispering into his ears, came in largely from the streets – imagine, for a moment, speaking on the phone to the likes of VK Lingam, Eric Chia, Musa Hitam, et al. Banal. Mismanagement and incompetence (with fraud) thrown in assured failure in billion dollar projects that Badawi, wise enough, gave up – think of the crooked bridge.

More ominous than the use of oil money that Mahathir conveniently ignored, or was not told, is oil’s aftermath. And that, not just on the government tax base, but also on party and national politics. Reduce by half the Petronas annual dividend, the tax collected in 2010 falls by 8 pct or 15 billion ringgit. In the national scheme of 160 billion, that sum is still nothing to shout about. A remedy to the shortfall is to cut the expenditures (especially “development” projects), borrow more, and/or raised taxes elsewhere.

Then, there is the entropy of time to deal with: against finite resources time does not heal. Rather it brings into collision the opposing forces of resource use and availability. Umno’s capacity to spread the oil largesse depends on ever increasing flows of money, but it faces an expanded and expanding constituency. This could only mean less money to more. As the Malay population expands (again thanks to Mahathir), the greater is the demand for the NEP (National/New Economic Policy) to be expanded. Umno’s factions splintering into cliques, some defecting to PKR, others to PAS, have their roots in this collision of opposing material and financial demands on the party and the government. So, it is no coincidence that the Asian financial debacle in 1987/88 brought out the Anwar Ibrahim’s forces that were expelled from Umno.

Those post 1998 events were in fact a manifestation of the government, probably without realizing it, having turned half the population not only into recipients of state treasury but a political class wedded to itself and to oil. Mahathir centered the fortunes of Umno and privatization of oil’s largesse. This is why he would tell Badawi, “We have the money.” Mahathir had to. Besides it was true; the money is still out, but always there?

Other than from oil, the government could even print currency if it is so desperate, and this, like Zimbabwe, will what it will have to do at some point. All government debts are bank notes printed by other means. The bond issue of 4 billion ringgit on the PKFZ project has to be returned in currency to lenders eventually. All debts of the GLCs, previously insolvent as private entities were, like the PKFZ, underwritten by the government. The exchange of land for a building that is the MITI convention center is the monetization of property. This property of land has to be turned into collateral. On that collateral is a debt, loan, bond or equity issued. When that land loses its appeal or when debt fails to be repaid in time or in full, as is the case with PKFZ, something breaks – typically a fresh debt is incurred. This is what happened to numerous privatization projects, the companies of which were turned into GLCs, in turn supported by government underwriting. Mahathir’s privatization was the issue of government infrastructure debt deferred, except that it was fronted by private conglomerates.

Figure 1: Data source World Bank

See how in Figure 1 debt service spiked from 8 pct of export incomes to about 30 pct in the early years of Mahathirism. Some sane economists must have driven into Mahathir’s head that such rate jumps were unsustainable so that it wasn’t until the 1990s that the debt service fell back to single digit levels. This does not mean that government borrowings fell in absolute terms. Plausibly, as Treasury records show, the government switched from short to long term borrowings, typically in rolling tranches of 10 to 20 years. Which then explains why, despite Badawi’s efforts to rein in on borrowings in the years 2004 to 2008 (Figure 2), public debt for every man, woman and child continues to climb, tripling in the last 12 years.



Figure 2: Data source EIU

In itself debt isn’t such a bad thing if you were confident to repay. Most rich countries, including Japan, have a debt load exceeding their GDP size. Ability to repay requires the economy or its people to have the productive capacity, in terms of factories, roads, ports, and so on. That productive capacity is what the debt is for, or should be intended for. This is known as capital formation: debt turned into investments. There was a period in the 1990s when Malaysian capital formation exceeded Singapore’s (Figure 3), suggesting that a rash of government borrowing successfully produce cars, steel, cement and so on – if only the world wanted them. Today, capital formation has fallen back to the levels thirty years ago, about 20 pct of GDP. Why? What then of future debt repayment?

Figure 3: Data source World Bank

The answers to the ‘why’ are varied: some causes lay outside Malaysia – lenders going to China for example – other causes are internal to its economy. Of the latter, there is both the lenders’ view and that of the borrowers’ (Malaysian government’s) ability to repay. If oil is going to stop to underwrite, at some point, future debt, then something or somebody else will have to. Governments can go bankrupt; Iceland is a most recent case in point; Latin America, further back.

Against, therefore, a political constituency – half the population – making endless demands on party and government; against falling oil revenues; and, against rising operating expenditures and expanded demographics, the government will find itself back against the wall. Has it reached that point? Probably not yet, but the shadows of a crunch are forming on the wall so that it is no accident Najib Razak has recently called for a “second wave of privatization”, despite its abject failure as policy and its corrupting effects – Malaysian politicians are notoriously inapt at handling money; no, money is not the root of all evil.

Other than debt and tax – the only two ways to raise money – privatization will, in accounting terms, spare the government of expenses, as it had done under Mahathir. The MITI convention center revisits Mahathirism, thereby adopting even a tried and tested method: exchanging land for facility and monetizing property. Like MAS, like Proton, like the commuter trains, the thing left now is only to wait for its eventual redemption.

A convention center like MITI’s supports the economic “development” part. But it does not solve a more fundamental problem: raising money for purposes as mundane as paying salaries and maintaining submarines. Thus, when either Najib or his deputy finance minister talks of restructuring the tax base, the ultimate intent is, in effect, to find ways of getting money to replace oil dividends quick, as soon as five, ten years from now.

Two new tax items – the capital gains tax and the goods and service tax (GST) – are clear throwbacks into a situation wherein government finance has painted itself into a corner. For a government that has pivoted its existence as a political party on wealth redistribution (one class only), it is instead going back to its people for money. That’s GST. Then, in the future, any Umno district-level boss meddling in transfer pricing, buying and selling to each other parcels of land or pieces of company assets must pay a tax – unless he cheats on the reporting. All this will wear off Umno’s raison d’etre as state material distributor, but for the moment this wear and tear is remedied with loud yelling of Ketuanan Melayu and displays of a crooked dagger.

Of the two new tax items, the GST is the more pervasive – and regressive. It reaches up and down to everybody and anybody, making no distinction between poor and rich, bumi and non-bumi. The government’s promise to lay it down “gently” won’t matter in the end. Tax exemptions for things like rice and flour will also not matter. A poor family subsisting on 800 ringgit a month spends nearly all 100 pct of that income on food, clothing, rent and transport; a same size family with 3,000 ringgit income living on the same terms will spent only 30 pct (900 ringgit). Add 4 pct in GST, that is, 32 ringgit (800 ringgit x 0.04), the poor family will have either to cut the amount of meat in the meals or borrow money. For the wealthier family the tax has no statistical significance; 32 of 3,000 ringgit is only 1pct.

The GST will not make up for dwindling oil revenues. In its existing form, narrowed to sale of some (mostly imported) goods and services in some economic areas (McDonald and hotels), the 10 pct sales and 5 pct service taxes (SST) bring in only about 12 billion a year, or no more than 9 pct of government revenues. Replacing this SST with a uniformed 4 pct GST, although offering a wider and deeper tax coverage, adds another 1 billion ringgit a year, which is the government’s projection.

The goods and services tax (GST) in multiple forms
		VAT	Profit	VAT	Price with	Present SST price
		add 10%	add 20%	price	4% GST	w/out VAT/GST
Supplier	0.77	0.08	0.15	1.00	0.92	0.92
Maker	1.00	0.02	0.20	1.22	1.11	1.11
Retailer	1.22	0.02	0.24	1.49	1.38	1.40
Notes:
1. While VAT is billed on the entire good/service in the beginning (supplier stage), it is billed
only on the margin, the gross profit layer, subsequently.
2. One-time 5 pct SST (sales & service tax) is charged only at retailer end.
Hence: 1.33 (with 20 pct profit)+ 1.33×0.05 SST = 1.40
3. Cost ignored between layers
4. Profit is gross at 20%, even for all

Figure 4

But 1 billion is a beginning, not only for individuals and families. For the government, the GST is the seed of the value-added tax, or VAT (see Figure 4). Take a McDonald’s ice-cream cone selling at 1.33 ringgit. Add 4 pct GST, you pay a one-time sum of 05 cents more, totaling 1.38. Under 10 pct VAT, you may pay 1.49, 18 cents more. This is because there are a series of in-between taxes that goes with and into making and selling you the ice-cream cone: the cone itself, the ice-cream, and all the little things that go with the service, napkins, refrigerator, dispensing machine and the like, that are sold individually to McDonald. GST is one time single sum, at the consumption end. VAT is GST in an invasive form, worked backwards, a multi-layered tax structure on the varied stages of production (hence, value-added), in essence a cascading set of consumption tax.

As a general, overarching tax category, a consumption tax is the single largest source of public revenue for most affluent countries. Denmark’s VAT, at 25 pct, accounts for also 25 pct of public revenues. The consumption tax in one form or another was 13 pct of total tax collected in Australia, 17 pct in Germany, 20 pct in South Korea but only 9 pct in Japan.

Figure 5: Source Economist

There is no correlation between an economy’s prosperity and the GST, but the unwritten deal is this: the greater the tax burden, the greater is the necessity of the government returning monies to its population, in the form of free health care, education, employment and other services. When last year’s financial collapse in America reached Taiwan where VAT is 6 pct, soon to be 7 pct, the government distributed NT$3,000 to every man, woman and child, no questions asked.

But, the Malaysian government has a miserable record of looking after its people, unless one is Malay and an Umno member – a fact Mahathir and other ministers have made plain and clear. Soon, with GST and without oil dividends, it has another argument of the NEP in refashioned form: tax the whole and return those sums to half the population, scholarships, subsidies, and all the usual goodies. That, along with the “second wave of privatization”, Umno has reason, therefore, to continue its kind of politics for another 50 years. As to the accumulating debts, that’s a problem for another time, another government. Why worry?

No, It’s Not a Bow; Yes, It’s a Bow; No, It’s an Obow

Read about Americans agonizing and spitting at each other over a bow, or sort of. What’s the matter with these Yanks: Don’t they know how to bow?

That, below, is a bow. A Jap bow: hands straight, perpendicular to the shoulders (for women, crossed at mid-riff), waist bent (not the neck, for tian’s sake), then dip forward, eyes down. After that, and only after that, shake all the hands to your heart’s content.

In China, the American president to come again, they must make him do the ‘three kneelings and nine knocks’, the sangui juikou 三跪九叩, actually bowing on your knees, thrice over. That’s the true bow. It goes like this, one step up, on your knees, hands parallel, stretched out, head to floor (repeat procedure three times):

This East Asian practice may be ancient, but hardly outdated. Koreans did it in on the streets of Hong Kong four years ago, Dec 2005.

Those Yanks, white or  black, should get use to the idea; it’s called, not obeisance, but high etiquette. So practise and practise. You see, there are many things greater than an American president, or America. On whose property do they think they have stepped on?

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:jjmqJXQoiBPZNM:http://cache2.asset-cache.net/xc/56436000.jpg%3Fv%3D1%26c%3DIWSAsset%26k%3D2%26d%3D17A4AD9FDB9CF193CC300C081D9F4700FB3C3B4DF4769FB3E8A979FFECF2108BF06BF04B24B4128C

Child Trafficking? O! Blimey, You Don’t Say…

Fodder for the White cause: ‘Hi kids. Welcome to Australia, your new motherland. For your country, even if poor.’

Compare and contrast (with emphases added in italics) …

From an AP report in Yahoo!:

As many as 150,000 poor British children were shipped off to the colonies over three and a half centuries, often taken from struggling families under programs intended to provide them with a new start — and the Empire with a supply of sturdy white workers.

Rewritten in the San Francisco Chronicle, also from an AP report:

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologized Monday to thousands of impoverished British children shipped to Australia in past centuries with the promise of a better life, only to suffer abuse and neglect thousands of miles from home.

There are two points of contention:

• (a) the British children relocation programme had a noble purpose – “better life” – for kids typically “poor”, “struggling”, “impoverished”. Your fault if you are poor.

• (b) the SFChronicle then attempts to airbrush the first AP report, by removing (and stuffing into the rear) the racist element – supply of white workers. To the Press, the programme remained worthy, only its administration failed because of “abuse and neglect”. Thus, if there was no “abuse and neglect”, then no apology, no recompense and the programme would be Christian charity?

How is it that the Press don’t get it? Or, is it just Anglo-Saxon racism. Still the Press say, give them “Press Freedom”.

The White kid trafficking (that’s what it would be today) went on in earnest until 1967, that’s living memory. The AP report continued:

Authorities believed they were acting in the children’s best interests, but the migration also was intended to stop them from being a burden on the British state while supplying the receiving countries with potential workers. A 1998 British parliamentary inquiry noted that “a further motive was racist: the importation of ‘good white stock’ was seen as a desirable policy objective in the developing British Colonies.” …

British Children’s Secretary Ed Balls said the child migrant policy was “a stain on our society.”

“It would never happen today. But I think it is right that as a society when we look back and see things which we now know were morally wrong, that we are willing to say we’re sorry.”

Two more points of contention:

• (a) “migrant policy”? They wouldn’t say it is government abduction, would they? Contrast Anglo-Saxon attitude towards children to Chinese in imperial China where laws as late as the Qing dynasty required children to pay respects to their parent, dead or alive, so the two sides cannot be separated from the home.

• (b) “morally wrong”? More than being criminal, it was fascist evil. Small wonder, British legacies in former colonies like Malaysia talk of building a “civil society” whereas brown and yellow skin peoples were a practising civilization long before White people coined the term “civil”.

All that “abuse and neglect” would be small change in the larger scheme of things the Anglo-Saxon had conceived.

Australia had an immigration policy that favored British and white immigrants until the 1970s. “We were used as white fodder,” (John) Hennessey (one of the deportees) said. “The Archbishop met us at Fremantle (in Western Australia) and I can still remember his words. He said, ‘Welcome to Australia. We want white stock because we’re terrified of the yellow peril.’” …

After 1920, most of the children went to Australia through programs run by the government, religious groups and children’s charities (Salvation Army is one).

Why, why, why is it that racism almost always breed out of a White culture, its people and their Christianity? And they do so even at the expense of their children’s welfare. Hear the silence from their brown and yellow skin apologists?

Mkini: Onwards! Press Freedom be Thy Name

It’s been ten years – flitting in the history of the written word – but Malaysiakini editors are already patting each others’ chin and stroking themselves on the shoulders. Thus, they have declared: “Our Agenda is Press Freedom“.

How touching, their way of declaring victory. And so very Yankee, so ethically uplifting. They make it sound like it were a successful Christian evangelical mission, which then had to be endorsed by … someone bearing, not coincidentally, such a name, Janet Steele. (If you’re into manufacturing, consider her the onsite QC factory inspector despatched from Washington.) “Press Freedom” is the sort of tag line you’d expect from the NED/CIA, from which Mkini refrains from making public and overt in the seed money it had received in the beginning.

Note what is not publicly declared of Mkini’s agenda: improved political participation, wider national discourse or, simply, for a better informed Malaysia. Instead, they had to say “Press Freedom”. The tenth anniversary, you see, is also Mkini’s report card day to the NED, which must in turn report to the American Congress.

But, in Malaysia, look what Press Freedom offers by way of licence: Utusan doctoring photographs, Anwar sues the the New Straits Times for MYR100 million, Ridhuan Tee gets to name-call, in print, babies “bastards”. With Press Freedom, the police gets away with shooting dead (again) people, an act they then justify, through the print and the media, as shooting “criminals”. After street crimes, there will be a rise in political crimes, the cause of which Hishamuddin Hussein would then be able to attribute, by inversion of the logic, to the demonisation of Press Freedom.

Mkini’s problem is this: there is never any proof that Press Freedom, the greater or the lesser, will give rise to or will secure increased individual liberty, even democracy. In many cases, it is to the contrary. There are countries that get along pretty well without it, as they are those with it. This is why Mkini mouths platitudes after its Western masters, treating Press Freedom as an end, not human welfare which can be secured without its existence or without Utusan or NST. It never says what’s the big deal with Press Freedom because the argument against it is equally devastating to the editor’s job, hence salary.

Malaysia Today, although clearly partisan, deserves more respect than Mkini. At the minimum, the former does not claim to be “unbias”, whereas editors at the latter spew reports from all the holes on their faces and posteriors. That, to them, is the meaning of Press Freedom, free to say, write anything, hence deliver the power editors hanker after but can’t get at the ballot box or from the barrel of a gun. It is an idea shared with American foreign policy that uses the “Freedom” Index to measure a country’s alignment to Washington interest: those out of alignment are branded as unfree. This is all very double-speak – war is peace, freedom is tyranny – but not that Mkini editors are adept with these Orwellian methods. It’s just that they’re a naive, imbecile lot, readily given to Yankee persuasion and the New York Times.

In Zhao Mingfu: A Coroner’s Inquest into Politics

One of the most jarring revelations emerging so far from the coroner’s inquest into Teoh Beng Hock (accurately, 赵明福 Zhao Mingfu) is, it contains all the elements of a criminal trial, not  an inquiry to produce a finding or to deduce a conclusion.

In a trial, guilt and innocence have everything to do with what goes on in court. However, an inquest exists to resolve an inexplicable event, to solve a puzzle, to determine cause and effect. All persons, witnesses, the varied and related parties,  the lawyers in particular, were to turn up in court purely to supply information thereby assist the judge, a magistrate, to reach a conclusion into the cause of Zhao’s death.

But, assisting is what none of them do. In particular, and most striking of all, is that witnesses and lawyers for the government and the supposedly anti-corruption agency MACC, issue questions, offer answers and make assertions purely to prove the point: Zhao killed himself. This is to say, they have already decided for the judge how the death should be ruled.

Of course, that is to be expected; MACC and, indeed, the government are on trial and they have all the resources of the world to make black look white, to turn fiction into fact, or make the real look unreal. This willingness, ability as well, to influence reality is not extraordinary – white Europeans are pioneers in contortion (think of Arthur Koestler’s Rubashov). But, in Malaysia, it lifts life onto a new plane.

The English judicial system, conventionally a place to determine life and death but given up in Malaysia as a battleground tool of politics, is now the place to determine what is true or false, the real from the unreal. Once the court sinks into this role, then the whole country joins in (as MACC did here to brush-paint its innocence). This is because reality tolerates neither boundaries nor limitations.

Yet truth is remarkably simple. After the testimony of Thailand’s Dr Pornthip Rojanasunand on Oct 21, it is now established fact:

1. Zhao died from a high fall. (a Rojanasunand fact that supports the conclusion of two government pathologists).
2. The originating place of the fall is the tower building offices of MACC at Plaza Masalam (fact told by MACC witnesses).

The two pieces of evidences are critical because they offer starting points from which to trace backwards, from Zhao’s moment of death into the MACC offices and thence to events in its rooms on July 16, the fateful day. There is now only the question left to be answered: What caused his fall from a height?

The government, the MACC, its lawyers, all said he jumped, and so did Malaysian Insider which tried to help along the idea. They not only want to preclude judgement, they were suggesting to the judge an alternative conclusion of reality, away from the window.

Looking from the ground up – and backwards in time – Rojanasunand points in another direction, through the window into the building. Therein is the answer, such as in the person of Zhao himself:

• skull: linear fracture before impact;
• chest: heavy injuries at moment of impact;
• hands: little injuries at moment of impact;
• neck: line abrasions before impact;
• thighs: blow injuries before impact;
• anal: penetration injuries before impact; and,
• heels and one shoe, separated from the rest of Zhao.

Once the answer is known, then it is possible to know whether if Zhao Mingfu was asked: Are you Chinese? It is in the nature of such a question that the seed of many past genocides had germinated: in Nanking by the Japanese, in Rwanda, in Germany, in Sudan, American bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Turk slaughter of Armenians and Kurds….

In Zhao Mingfu is also the inquest into a national body politic of institutionalised  racism, therefore, all the grounds to suppress as unreal.

From Bagan Pinang: Deniers and Denials

Even in conceding the Pakatan Rakyat loss in Bagan Pinang, the arrogance of power and self-righteousness is palpable. Here is DAP’s Lim Kit Siang:

“(Isa Samad’s) victory despite his record of Umno money politics would be a clear and unmistakable message that Umno/BN could not be redeemed.” (In his usual meandering, convoluted prose, Kit Siang, who prizes his English ability over MCA politicians, is wrong in the word, ‘despite’. It should be ‘in spite of’. Probably he doesn’t know the difference.)

Kit Siang then suggests that Pakatan leaders go back to the “drawing board” – an odd suggestion. Weren’t they finished with the drawing board when they went out in March last year? If they weren’t, what were they doing at the drawing board then? Doodling?

After him there is Salahuddin Ayub who, in saying that the loss arose because Pakatan didn’t do enough for Indians, is deflecting the responsibility away from PAS, his party. “It is not the fault of PAS, it’s Pakatan,” is the statement in effect. Kit Siang and he are on common ground.

But a cursory look at the numbers speaks to an entirely different picture. Umno up its majority margin by 3,100 votes from 2,300 last year. Even to grant the improbable fact that the entire 20 percent Indians  (of the 13,600 electorate) voted for PAS in 2008, Salahuddin is also saying all, if not most, of the 2,700 Indian votes it had pocketed before went back to Umno. Really? He said next to nothing of the Malay vote swing.

Salahuddin is like Hadi Awang before him, the latter blaming the uncivilised loincloth Sarawakians of Batang Ai for not seeing the “high culture” of PAS, therefore not voting it. Salahuddin has to blame anybody and everybody else but the Malays for rejecting his party because to say so he then have to concede that his party is a shadow, the Islamic Other of Umno. Being the Other means that wherever there is Umno, it’s redundant. Worse than that, the Malays, other than those in Kelantan, don’t give it a damn; because of or in spite of its religious credentials makes for no difference, it loses the vote either way.

Other than Salahuddin, there are also the Pakatan cheerleaders, fellows like Tian Chua, Nathaniel Tan, Azly Rahman, Haris Ibrahim, et al – people who before Bagan Pinang talk much about “deniers” and “denials” (by Barisan, of course). If they’re not silent now, embarrasing so, then they either blame “political immorality” or “money politics” that, in the flip side of the argument, slanders the people of Bagan Pinang for being corruptible, taking corrupt money when they knew Isa is corrupt. They don’t even have the courtesy to grant sovereignty to the people of Bagan Pinang to choose who like want.

Related to the slandering  excuses, Malaysiakini tops all when it says Isa, not Umno, won Bagan Pinang. What’s the basis for that “independent” assertion? Answer, Isa is popular. What if Isa had lost, then it would still be because of him and not Umno? Malaysiakini, thus, have to reach the following bizarre conclusion, if it is not to be contradictory: Isa winning or losing arises from his personal popularity, a corrupted self included. And, since Umno didn’t win (or lose) Bagan Pinang, Umno must be clean as whistle.

Covered in this raft of chest thumping, hail-and-brimstone justifications over Bagan Pinang, what lies beneath the loss by PAS? What’s the reality? The answer is so self-evident it seems nearly pedestrian to have to say so: PAS. The party lost because the party went in. Only the ramifications need debate, not why PAS lost (it lost because of it).

• One ramification: the so-called March 2008 tsunami of Lim Kit Siang was purely an accident, too many voting at the same time against Barisan and not because of the godliness of Pakatan. March 2008 was a coincidence and a nation-wide mistake. But, later, Kit Siang will have to go to his grave without seeing another tsunami – lucky him – while his son can dream on about water rafting into Putrajaya.

• Two: As long as PAS is the reason for the loss, then all the talk of going back to the “drawing board” will amount to nothing. Kelantan excepting, Bagan Pinang says this: where there is PAS, there won’t be DAP or PKR – that, or they will go down with it. Umno sees this, and use it effectively in the by-election; only the Pakatan cheerleaders and Lim Kit Siang wish to deny this reality, either out of stupidity or of the vague hope of tapping into the Malay bank of votes. They can’t answer convincingly why, between Umno and PAS, should a Malay choose PAS? They can say why people should not choose Umno, but why should they choose PAS? Because it has god on its side, and no money?

• Three: DAP-PKR-PAS makes for a highly combustible, even dangerous mixture. One adores the rule of law, one loves to make everything law (especially the godly kind); in between them, a third veils the mutual authoritarianism by talking justice and equality. There is a phrase for their eventual outcome: democratic despotism. You see this future all over Britain today (so admired by the Malaysiakini types): what you can say, what you can’t say, where you can smoke, where you can’t, when you can swim, where you can’t. And, of course, what to drink and where. The lesson from Pakatan Selangor and learned in Bagan Pinang is not that the DAP and PAS disagreed on beer sales. The lesson is that they, DAP, PKR and PAS, agreed on who can drink beer and who can’t. But Malaysians and Malaysian culture are smarter than, and came before, this DAP-PKR-PAS claptrap. Even the poor of Bagan Pinang sees through them, the danger in them: their god, their law, and after which, to subject everybody, equally, to both.

So, why not take Isa’s money and be safe from their tyranny? Immorality? Bagan Pinang just said to Anwar Ibrahim, to Lim Kit Siang and to Hadi Awang, in moral terms, f— off.

I’m No Paki. I’m Bangsa Great Britain

You call me a ‘Paki’? Did you?! I’ll sue ya …. Now, where is this Bangsa Bolehland? I hear Pakis can go on to be prime ministers in that country.

The Bangsa Malaysia types, along with the PKR Nathaniels, Elis, and the Malaysiakini Swee Engs, look to Britain for inspiration on multiculturalism (no Kadazans, no Dayaks, no Chinese, no Malays, no Indians, only Malaysians – how cool!), and which they have only a vague idea about. From Tim Black at the Spiked! is a lesson in multiculturalism for these types…

First, the background:

It seems that two weeks ago (Laila) Rouass, whose mother is Indian and father Morrocan, emerged from the BBC’s Star Bar having just had quite a severe fake-tan session. Beke caught one glimpse of her Dale Wintonesque appearance and quipped, quick as a flash, ‘Oh my god, you look like a Paki’. In (Anton Du) Beke’s head, it was probably hilarious. Unfortunately, outside of Beke’s head the audience was not quite as simple-minded. Rouass, who had apparently already been annoyed by Beke’s numbskulled exclamation upon discovering her foreign parentage – ‘You’re not a terrorist are you?’ – glared at him in silence for a bit, before collecting her stuff from the dressing room and going home in a huff. And that was that.

Then the fallout:

Politicians (…) spotted an opportunity to prove their anti-racist credentials, with Labour MP Parmjit Dhanda declaring: ‘[That] kind of language is totally unacceptable. It sounds to me as if Anton Du Beke needs to be sent on a race awareness course.’ Which sounds like a great idea.

Perhaps they could turn it into a show.

(… A) spokesman for Hope Not Hate, a campaign run by the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, was therefore able to conclude: ‘If calling someone a Paki is not racist behaviour then what is?’

After that, the apology:

‘There was no racist intent whatsoever (said Beke), but I accept that it is a term which causes offence and I regret my use of it, which was done without thought or consideration of how others would react.’

It is a strange kind of apology, but it is also very revealing.

… ‘If calling someone a Paki is not racist behaviour then what it is?’ And therein lies the rub. What exactly is racist behaviour these days?

And here is the legal definition by a White judge, who is equal to saying that you can go to jail for calling Mahathir Mohamad ‘mamak’:

Lord Macpherson provided a broad definition of racism as ‘unwitting racism’. Writing of the police, he wrote that such racism ‘can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.’ And if people do not know that they are racist, not to worry; it is enough for others to judge them as such. Or in the words of the report, racism is evident in ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or by any other person’ (emphasis added).

See, it isn’t only Malaysian judges who write inane judgements; they studied under the Macpherson types, for whom crime is, suddenly, to be “thoughtless”, to be “ignorant”, and the other, any other, person has only to “perceive”, that is, to accuse, in order to get a conviction. Such is a White man’s multicultural, all inclusive, equal rights law they promote and sell to the world: “I perceive, therefore you’re racist. And therefore you’re guilty.” Tim Black concludes:

While racism is certainly not what it was, neither is anti-racism. Being against racism, the act of taking offence, almost always on others’ behalf, has become a self-affirming posture for politicians and media proxies alike, a moral crusade in times of limited purpose. … Even the most informal of social relations (Ed. note: the fracas had started as a banter, innocently enough, in privacy, between two friends), the most knotted of negotiations, are now fodder for official anti-racists to pick over and dissect for offence potential. The effect has been stifling and petty. Contemporary Britain resembles not so much a comedy, as a tragedy of manners.

But Black (Oops! Was that racist?) might be mistaken on one count: No, there is no tragedy in the lesson because, once accused of racism, you are guilty until proven innocent. Britain is never tragic, the White man had it good for more than a century; the UK is an international, imperial joke today. White Britain introduced, and actually wrote,  racism into the Malaysian federal constitution more than 50 years ago. Now, to see British, white on white, brown on white and so on, drive stakes into each other, spit at each other, tear at one another, over the word ‘Paki’, said so in jest, is so poetic; sweet justice, as they say. Many in the rest of the world pray for it to continue down that way. It’s, as Sharon Stone says, karma. Cheers, mate!

浩气长存 Beneath the Autumn Cypress

Poems from the past to the dead…

On a mountain slope, at the end of a flight of concrete steps, total count 240 because 2.4 millon (soldiers) is in Chinese script writing 240 wan 萬, the timber gateway is painted red, as it is always, and topped by a roof that says in hanzi and Korean “Martyrs Cemetery of the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army”. There are dozens of these cemeteries spread throughout North Korea, a reminder of a war ignited 59 years ago by the United States, the United Nations in tow. The war still goes on today, though in different ways. At a Washington newspaper forum, they have described the martyrs’ cemetery as a consequence of the Korean war against the US. Yes, “against”, rather than a defense from US invasion.

But, here, it is Hoechang County, about 100 km east of Pyongyang. After the gateway, and still among the cypress and pine trees, is a hexagonal pavilion, the kind you see in Chinese gardens. Chinese porcelain tiles are hexagonal; traditional Chinese lanterns are hexagonal; the Chinese checker is hexagonal of two overlapping equilateral triangles. Why hexagonal? The answer is embedded in the naturalist philosophy of the Daoist yijing (易经) or Book of Changes where earth is symbolically three equally split lines of a trigram, like this: ☷. Beyond the pavilion a soldier, sculptured in bronze, stands alone on a 14-metre high stone pedestal. To the soldier, and to ten of thousands others, all dead, away from home, China’s prime minister Wen Jiabao offers a wreath laid in advance. He has come to pay his tribute, for Chinese memories are long and deep.

Behind the soldier are the grave mounds,  shaped a globe split half, of 134 Chinese soldiers, Mao Anying, Mao Zedong’s eldest son, among them. You could tell it’s him from the bust: name inscription, the farmer’s felt cap, youthful, but with perhaps a certain likeness of his father. Now in front of the bust, Jiabao speaks to him, dead at age 28 from an American napalm bomb that so badly flamed his body and face he was only recognized by the watch he wore then. It is as if Mao Anying was still alive, for such is Chinese honor for the past, the dead, the alone, the ones far from home:

“Anying, my colleague. Many seasons have come to past. I am here to see you on behalf of the Chinese people. China today has prevailed and is stronger. Our people have endured. Rest in peace then.”

Three times Wen Jiabao bowed; they are deep bows from the waist up.

There are in China, and elsewhere, many Anyings, the un-consoled, detached and alone in their dignity, sacrifice and suffering for such is the nature in the Chinese perception of the human heart, always impenetrable and more profound than reason. Kongzi has said: “You have not yet comprehend life, how then can you know death?” This is why life takes time.

Expect however the West to heap scorn on Jiabao’s visit to the cemetery as “propaganda”, for such is their cynicism and nihilism wrought from a self-centered culture – I think, therefore I am – begetting a self-righteous morality, now promoted as human right. How then to expect they will understand anything: here, a senior government official standing among the dead, talking with them. No White government in the world does that; they rather speak to those alive, to White reporters and their brown, yellow-skinned underlings (think of Malaysiakini and this), because only crowds deliver votes. Dead people don’t.

Even so, that is a minor point. White, democratic governments serve the present; but, here is a Chinese government reporting to the past about the present and this says, “we know our responsibilities, our duties”. The West can’t understand that an unelected government does have responsibilities. It is, variously, called tianming, and the Mandate of Heaven. So then, expect the Westerns editors and newspapers to say, instead, North Korea is “intransigent” and “provocative” while China, 60 years on, continued to support a “rogue state”, without “freedom”, without food and penniless.

Stopping at last among the mounds of graves, shaded by autumn trees of cypress, Jiabao say to the rest:

“It’s been a four hour travel. … I have come to see you. All the (Chinese) people (wish to) honor you. … They have not forgotten. But it’s been been more than fifty years. Life’s great where it excels / death stills where you may lay.” (浩气长存 haoqi changcun)

No White government official visits graveyard (Western reporters call Wen’s visit, a “tour”), let alone cite poetry to the dead. Democracy has no time for such pieties nor esthetics. Yet, all is normal. Wen Jiabao does what all Chinese are raised to believe and what a good Confucian does; democrats do not equal virtue, to the contrary. This “goose-stepping” country, so vilified by the West and its underling daily mouthpieces, possesses the qualities of virtue that they have yet even to see exist, much less understand.

The clip below has the underlying meaning, the essence in Wen Jiabao’s visit to those among the cypress trees:

Rebel Against Umno: For a Mongol PAS?

That’s no moon a dragon will swallow… (also see earlier entries ).

In the 5,000 years of written Chinese history and its cycle of dynasties, about 20 came to preside over China and Han Chinese society. Seven of them – Xia, Shang, Zhou, Han, Tang, Ming, Qing – lasted longer, far longer than is American history since its “independence”, actually White conquest, settlement and internal rule. The Yuan in the 14th Century is not one of those dynasties and was, to the contrary, one of the shortest reigning eras (no more than 100 years).

How could Mongolians rule? True to Han Chinese understanding of them, they were nomads on horse backs and when the time came to rule, they were in every sense of the description barbarians without a civic and an ethical culture, inflicting endless rounds of bloodletting, including making slaves of children from the farms and where the Mongolian ruling class helped themselves to grain, women, and animals. Contrast this to the Qing dynasty, among whom the Manchus learned hanzi, detached government from the peasantry, left alone to Han Chinese as best as is practical, adhered to the Confucian code of conduct in supervisory rule, and administered stockpiles to redistribute food from the abundant to the poorer regions.

One of the lasting characteristics of Chinese society is known as 吃苦, chiku, literally “eat bitterness”, that is, enduring great hardships. When some “Malay” commentators (Mahathir Mohamad, for example) described the Malay individuals as patient and forebearing until they go “amok”, they were actually describing an ideal pre-Islamic Malay society. And Chinese society, as well. Chinese forbearance last centuries.

PAS towelheads

When Nizar Jamaluddin (here and here, where Malaysiakini, under the cover of “independent” reporting, pines for PAS) compared the present political state in Malaysia to the Yuan era, he missed, perhaps deliberately, a point: how should the Chinese substitute Mongolians? With PAS? But PAS is not Ming, not even by an iota. And even within the Ming, it arose a betrayal in Wu Sangui 吳三桂, who for power his own will let in barbarians through the Shanhai Pass. Who is going to be the Wu Sangui in PAS or Pakatan Rakyat? We have already seen the likes of Hadi Awang and Hasan Ali and what they will do once in power. Then there is that Zulkifli Noordin…. And the Ngehs and the Ngas of DAP Perak.

Trust PAS? But the Chinese, and equal numbers of Malays and Indians, have already been betrayed, a dozen times over.

Nizar fails to understand this: the beginning of good, decent rule is in qualities of persons, not in god. And he has, in spite of or perhaps precisely because of his good nature, such terrible company that they use him rather than the other way around.