Ethnic Relations in the Malaysian

Ethnic Relations in the Malaysian Peninsula

Some Chinese traders had settled in the country of Malaysia for centuries before other Chinese ethnic groups joined them in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although there has been an intermixture among the Chinese and other political minorities and the Malays as the political majority population, the Chinese have managed to preserve their cultural distinctions from the Malays, basically through religion and language. The Chinese use the Chinese language as distinguished from the Malay language and practice Buddhism, as differentiated from the Malays who are Muslim. The Chinese are grouped into the rural poor sector and the urban commercial sector, the latter being more economically capable and productive than the majority Malays.

There have been these fundamental and historical conflicts between the majority Malays and the minority Chinese communities. The British ruled the peninsula and Singapore through the Chartered Company in Sabah and the Brooke family in Sarawak the Japanese Occupation made these conflicts worse during the last World War, during which the Malays sided with the Japanese against the British colonial rule and the Japanese mistreated the Chinese, who rebelled against them and formed the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army or MPAJA. When Japan lost the War, the MPAJA took violent actions in establishing control over the peninsula. The Chinese rural poor sector supported it and its succeeding organization, the Malayan Communist Party or MCP, founded in 1948. The British favored the Malays in counterattacking the Chinese communists, who became the targets of repression by the government and placed them in "new villages" in the 50s where they had little contact with the majority Malays. The MCP was believed to have been instigated and led by pro-Beijing Chinese, creating an impression among the Malay population that some Chinese were loyal to Communist China. The apprehension created a deep division between the Malays and the Chinese and impelled the government to pass the Internal Security Act of 1960 in order to grant itself arbitrary police powers in controlling the activities of its opponents. It took years of bloody fights before the British government was able to contain the rebellion. Meantime, the urban and economically advantaged Chinese distanced themselves from the MCP to protect their economic interests.

In 1963, the Federation of Malaysia was created and comprised peninsular Malaya, Singapore, Sabah and Sarawak, the last two being in Borneo Island. Later in 1965, Singapore was separated when leader Lee Kuan Yew, disagreed with and challenged the Malay political supremacy. Malaysia is now where the ethnic Chinese are the largest minority in the entire South-East Asia or 27% of Malaysia's 20 million people.

The Malayan Constitution categorizes the population into the bumiputera and the non-bumiputera. "Bumiputera" means "son of the soil" and this is the state's official recognition of a citizen's indigenous status. Non-bumiputera means not indigenous or "immigrants." The Constitution acknowledges the ethnic Malays and other indigenous ethnic groups as bumiputera in Sabah and Sarawak, which constitute approximately 59% of the population. The rest, or the non-bumiputera, are the Chinese at 27%, Indians at 8% and the remaining 6% for other smaller minorities. The Constitution vests special legal, economic and political rights to the bumiputera. For example, the New Economic Policy or NEP of 1971, later renamed into the New Development Policy, imposed a 30% quota for bumiputera on all social and economic spheres. This policy was grounded on the assumption of Chinese historical economic advantage and that the wealth gap between the bumiputera Malays and the non-bumiputera Chinese, if uncontrolled, would lead to political instability. The discriminatory policy was a compensatory move to equalize the situation wherein the non-bumiputera and minority ethnic Chinese already made an impressive and "Constitutional" bargain during the May 13, 1969 elections in Kuala Lumpur and prior to independence.

A bargain was supposedly reached between the Malay and Chinese political elites, whereby the Chinese community acquiesced to Malays' "special rights" in exchange for citizenship based on place of birth or "jus soli." The bargain, according to some Chinese leaders, was reached without previous consultation with the Chinese community and on condition that these would be removed when the Malay or bumiputera community became economically at par with the Chinese community. Malay leaders, however, claimed that the arrangement was permanent. The Constitution bars the Chinese ethnic community from re-evaluating the old and sensitive issue of "constitutional bargain" and that citizenship and Malays' "special rights" cannot be questioned or discussed, even in Parliament, without violating the Sedition or Internal Security Act. There have been reports of Chinese activists and other oppositionists getting detained for raising such questions or issues.

The Chinese ethnic minority - and other minorities - has suffered discrimination, specifically in employment and economic opportunities. They can get employment only in private businesses, because work recruitment in the public service is almost exclusive for the bumiputera at a traditional ratio of 1:4. Observers say the practice has further reduced this proportion to 1:10. In the top levels of public service, there were less than 10% non-Malays.

The Chinese believe that the survival of their culture depends largely on the retention of Chinese schools for their children. but, after independence and over the years, vernacular schools were established throughout the country and used the Malay language, Bahasa Malaysia, as the official language and medium of instruction in all government schools. The government did not recognize independent Chinese and other vernacular schools that would perpetuate their indigenous language and culture. Neither could their graduates apply to teach in government institutions or work in the public service. These schools were also ineligible for any kind of government funding or support, since government views these as obstacles to national unity and assimilation.

The Malay government also wanted to integrate the Chinese and Tamil languages into the dominant and Malay school system, to which privately funded Chinese schools that used Mandarin as medium of instruction lobbied heavily against. Among Malaysian Chinese advocacy and lobbying pressure groups were the Democratic Action Party or DPA, which regularly contested election results against the National Front or NF.

The government also enhanced the Malay share of the economy by strongly promoting only select Malay businessmen, who were awarded multi-million contracts without requiring them to go through difficult processes. The government also gave first preference for government projects, supply tenders and trade licenses to these bumiputera businessmen for whom all financial institutions were obliged by law to set aside 30% of their loans. The objective was to establish a bumiputera industrial and commercial community that would be economically competitive with the Chinese. But what evolved was a kind of rentier bumiputera business class that took advantage of the government's favorable treatment in turning itself into a group of genuine entrepreneurs.

The big Chinese businesses could withstand the slanted treatment and discrimination, some of them using Malay fronts in order to survive. But the small to medium businesses were significantly disadvantaged by the NEP and the NDP, which deterred their expansion. Nevertheless, Chinese businesses still constituted approximately half of the economy while the Malays share stood at only 20-3o%, the rest being foreign.

The Chinese were likewise significantly undermined in employment. The law required large companies to maintain a minimum of 30% bumiputera staff. Some Malay companies had a 90%, even 100%, bumiputera by observing a bumiputera-first hiring policies.

Overall discrimination covered religion and culture. The official religion in the peninsula was Muslim, while almost all of the Chinese ethnics in Malaysia were non-Muslim. They were Taoists, Confucians, Buddhists and Christians. The Malaysian Constitution guaranteed religious freedom but, in practice, the law seriously banned proselytizing to Muslims, building new temples and churches and the use of "Islamic" terms. The glaring fact was that it was government policy to promote Islamic values in the entire arena of public life, begun in the 70s but became aggressive from the 80s. This policy built a International Islamic University, Islamic banking and finance, expanded Islamic schools and a state-funded mosque-building program. Students in tertiary levels in government-funded schools and universities were obliged to take and pass a course on the basics of Islam, whatever their religious faith.

State-sanctioned missionary groups, called Dakwah, concentrate on the Chinese for conversion to Islam and reports were received on some high-profile Chinese teen-age girls turning to Islam without parental consent, pressure applied on non-Muslim students in boarding schools to change their religion, and a Chinese Muslim preacher verbally attacking the Christian religion and traditional Chinese faiths on television. In other cases, money or financial help was offered for a shift in religion. A change to Islam involved a change in ethnic identity itself in that the Malaysian Constitution defined a Malay as a Muslim and that, therefore, a change in faith or conversion to Islam in Malaysia meant a racial or ethnic alteration or adoption. In so doing, these converts would have to severe all cultural and language links and orientation, even a change to Malay names. The government also announced in 1971 that a National Cultural Policy or NCP was in effect to establish an indigenous society. Under it, conversion to Islam was irreversible and only Malay and Islamic cultures were recognized and in disregard of the fact that about half of the total population in the peninsula was non-Malay and non-Muslim.

Although the privileges and favors given to the Malays were to help bring them to the same economic productivity level as the Chinese, the government policy of discrimination did not appear likely even if the Malays managed to achieve that purpose. The system was seen as staying where it was, that is, in favor of the Malay, the bumiputera, and Islam. The experience of privilege and favor reached the unconscious level of the Malay mentality, whereby they began to believe that the treatment was a birthright, not a condition or encouragement to productivity. They were quite smug in the awareness that this subsidy or privileged position was directly linked to or caused by their "inherent" or traditional political dominance.

To compound the Chinese's travails, the Malay and the government's share in the economy was projected to increase, further decreasing Chinese political or economic leverage or grounds to acquiring government concessions. This already immensely disadvantaged ethnic minority was also predicted to diminish in population from 22 to 5% in the next decades. Largely urban Chinese tended to have fewer children due to the effects of industrialization and immigration from Indonesia and Southern Philippines. Immigrants from these foreign countries were themselves ethnic Malays and Muslims. Gleaning from the earlier and recent developments, the minority rights of Malaysian Chinese at present and in the foreseeable future are deemed unlikely and not visible.

The Indians were another ethnic minority that had much trouble with the Malays. One of the skirmishes between them occurred in the first week of March, 2000 in a village at the edge of Kuala Lumpur and killed 5 Indians and 1 Indonesian. A Malay family wedding coincided with an Indian funeral and led to a quarrel and a series of other clashes. Police apprehended around 200 persons and charged 75 with various offenses. Expectedly, the ruling party accused the minorities of taking advantage of the situation by putting the capital in bad light through this incident. Opposing parties contended, instead, that the turbulence simply exposed its true cause, which was the poor living conditions of the villages due, in turn, to racial differences and discrimination. The last recorded major conflict between the Malay Muslims and the Indians was in 1998 involving the relocation of a Hindu shrine in Penang. These contentions may seem isolated and affected only a small area, but the tensions remained and something that the political leaders of the Malaysian Indian community should adequately address. These poor Indian communities were isolated and left out of the stream of progress but exploited for political ends. These clashes, though few, brought attention to the sore and sordid conditions of this third largest ethnic group in the peninsula, referred to by the Malaysian government as those belonging to the Indian sub-continent, inhabited by the Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans.

The Malaysian Indians comprise 8% of the total population of 22 million, but they own only 1% of the peninsula's natural wealth. The country's labor force was also once dominated by this ethnic population, but the ingress of Indonesian laborers began to displace the Malaysian Indians. Some critics blamed the Indians themselves for their plight, to some extent. When Malaysia became independent in 1957, it offered citizenship but perhaps because of ignorance and the poverty that characterized the plantations, many of these Malaysian Indians failed to take that offer of advantage that could have allowed them to acquire or keep jobs. More than half of their population worked in plantations or as hired hands or menial laborers in the cities. They ranked lowest in school exams and highest among drop-outs. Moreover, probably because of steep poverty, delinquency and drug trafficking were prevalent in Indian communities. Asiaweek (2001 as qtd in Kuppuswamy) reported that 63% of emergency arrests for violent crimes, 41% of beggars and 20% of child abusers in the country were Indians.

The Malaysian Indians, unlike the Malaysian Chinese, did not value education or consider it an investment. Tamil schools did not provide an opportunity to higher education for them and these Indians' insistence for a Tamil education further disadvantaged them by pushing them into a hopeless competition with the Malays and the Chinese. Urban Indian families, who were better-off economically and realized the situation, sent their children to universities abroad, instead.

The better educated and more vocal Indians blamed the Malaysian Indian Congress or MIC for neglecting the conditions of the Indians. The MIC was the leading political party of the Indians and the only one representing their interests. It was a constituent of the coalition government since independence, but which did not appear to have very much power or suitable environment with which to improve the minority's condition. There were differences and clashes among the party leaders themselves and this eroded its credibility in the Malaysian political arena. Dissensions also brewed between Tamils and non-Tamils. Approximately 80% of the total Malaysian Indian population was composed of Tamils, and this Indian population was the hardest hit sector by the stringent government policies against non-Malays.

The Malaysian Indians failed to take advantage not only of the government's offer of citizenship but also the introduction of work permits and the allocation of quotas for educational institutions for the different ethnic groups. When the NEP introduced the bumiputera policy and gave the bumiputera the major share in the public sector, the Indians were unrepresented. All of the private sector belonged to the Chinese. The Indians were too few and their contribution to the national economy too negligible to be heard or to matter. The government of India paid little attention to the concerns of the Malaysian Indians and other Indians in the South East Asian region through the years. It could and should help them by offering educational opportunities for them in India, closely monitor the labor conditions of Malaysian Indians and strengthen cultural and economic ties with them, thereby bolstering tourism potentials in Malaysia.

Prospects for the improvement of the conditions of the Malaysian Indians ultimately depended on the cooperation and extent of the integration among them. How they could survive the problems and lack of economic resources ad adequate government support and how they could remain passive in the face of these make observers wonder if they are merely resilient or an insensate third major race or third-class race in Malaysia.

With the enforcement of the Malaysian language as the official medium of instruction, most Malay graduates still opted for public service positions, which entrenched their political supremacy, and left businesses and the professions to the Chinese. Malay graduates failed to fulfill the goals of the 1990 Second Malaysian Plan to come to par with the economic productivity of the ethnic Chinese, with only an estimated 10% turning into commercial and industrial entrepreneurs, short of the 30% minimum goal. One reason was the persistence of colonial-based government programs, which disinclined Malay graduates to engage in commerce. The Malay Reservation Enactment continued and broadened Malay involvement in agriculture under the Merdeka Constitution. The Federal Land Development Authority or FELDA made land accessible only to Malays and encouraged them to develop untilled government land for agriculture and could buy it at cheaper cost.

These two laws were demonstrative of the lingering effects and influence of British colonialism and its colonial policy of vitalizing Chinese enterprise and acquiring Indian labor drastically changed the demography of the Malayan peninsula. The open resolution of real and critical issues that pit the ethnic races against one another remains forbidden by power fluctuations and further intensifies the chronic and traditional dissension among them. Even school children who sing about unity and success were told by their parents to stay away from their Malay or Chinese playmates or classmates. The spirit of the 1969 riots appeared to stay in these parents and until and unless the deeply-rooted animosity was addressed realistically, the front would be reduced to mere propaganda.

Discrimination could be easily gleaned in the area of education. In 1980, 70% of the total enrollment in Malaysian institutes was Malay, a sharp inequity, considering that Malays accounted for only 40-5-% of the total population. If the ethnic minorities were considered or counted as Malays, the figures would be different and equal. The fact was that most of the indigenous people were traditionally rural and tribal and with low educational attainment. It was also unlikely for these indigenous people to enroll or attend universities.

Malaysia is a middle-income country, which evolved from a producer of raw materials in the 70s to the 90s to an emerging multi-sector economy through its controversial New Economic Policy or NEP. Its growth was almost entirely exports-driven, especially electronic products, for which it was hit hard by the global economic crisis in the information technology sector in 2001.

Its gross domestic product grew only at.3%, with 11% contraction from exports. A substantial financial program was, however, able to reduce the impact of the recession. Kuala Lumpur was seen to possess a stable macroeconomic environment where both inflation and unemployment were not higher than 3%, strong foreign exchange reserves, and relatively limited external debt would cushion Malaysia from a financial crisis similar to that of 1997. But its long-term prospects required reforms in the corporate sector to address competitiveness and high corporate debt.

Malaysia is multi-ethnic, with the Malays as the political majority. Its ethnic groups are the Chinese South, Indians North, Cantonese, Hainese, Hakka, Henghau, Hockchew, Hokkien, Kwonsai, Peranakan, Teochew, Keralan, Sinhalese, Tamil, Gujeratis, Parsis, Dayaks, Ibans, Kadazans, other Arabic descent, ethnic Malays and Indonesian ethnic groups. Other Malaysians include people of European, middle Eastern, Cambodian and Vietnamese descent. These European and Eurasian descendants included those of the British who colonized and settled there, some Portuguese and Arabs from the middle Easterners who introduced Islam to Malaysia. Some Kampucheans and Vietnamese also settled there as refugees of the Vietnam War. About 20 or more of them are concentrated in the Malay Peninsula.

Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with the title of king elected for a term of five years among the nine sultans of the peninsular states. The king is also the head of the Islamic religion in the country. The prime minister exercises executive power and must be a member of the lower house of parliament. The bicameral parliament consists of 69 Senate members, each with a term of six years, 26 of whom are elected by the 13 state assemblies and 43, appointed by the king. Federal and state legislatures share legislative power. Its legal system is based on the English common law, whereby the federal court reviews decisions by the Court of Appeals; exercises original jurisdiction over constitutional issues and disputes between federal and state governments.

The Malaysian federal government controls external affairs, defense, internal security, justice - except civil law cases involving Malays or other indigenous groups - federal citizenship, finance, commerce, industry, communication, and transportation.

The racial-social-economic imbalance has been considered a main cause of the May 13, 1969 civil unrest that led to the adoption of the New Economic Policy as the Malay government's approach to solve the problem and eradicate poverty. It claimed to be an industrializing economy, which has been growing rapidly and helped reduce racial division and discontent by opening up opportunities to the entire population that could raise their standard of living. It also said that it initiated ties among ethnic groups through business partnerships and transactions, especially among the Chinese. It noted that, as the ethnic Chinese took advantage of these transactions and partnerships in enterprise, their economic power also grew and that these land holdings modified the structure of the agricultural and urban sectors. This ferocious competition led to the 1969 riots between the Malays and the Chinese to which the government responded by instituting the bumiputera or "Malays First" policy with the end-view of closing or reducing the gap among the ethnic groups and promote social harmony. This policy crossed all arenas from education and employment to social relations. It did not leave fate to economic forces to shape or for ethnic groups to control. The policy, instead, attempted and still strives to balance the diverse customs, lifestyles, and educational opportunities, even if it appeared to favor the Malays. What became evident was the resulting peaceful and harmonious coexistence among the ethnic and religious groups and how this coexistence has fashioned the country's booming economy and remarkable growth in the past decades

Malaysia's economy was seen to have grown from a.3% gross domestic product level in 2001 to 4.1% in 2002 and 5.2% last year, primarily because of a bustling manufacturing sector and electronics and chemical industries in particular. Its global electronics sector recovered to a level that made the U.S. Malaysia's chief export market and trade and investment partner. Sustained and strong domestic demand and global growth indicated that the economy continues to grow to 6.5% this year. The bilateral trade between Malaysia and the U.S. last year was worth U.S. $36.4 billion, with U.S. exports to Malaysia at $10.9 billion and U.S. imports at $25.4 billion. This made Malaysia the U.S.' 10th largest trading partner and the 16th largest export market. U.S. exports to Malaysia were valued at $5,5 billion and imports at $13 billion in the first six months of this year. Malaysia successfully evolved from a commodity-based to a manufacturing -based economy and aims at taking another leap into a knowledge-based economy. Rubber and tin were its basic commodities when it gained independence, but the country went through broad diversification and swift growth between the early 80s and the mid 90s to become one of Asia's best economies. New foreign and domestic investment brought the development about. Agriculture and mining, which traditionally accounted for 42.7% of Malaysia's GDP in 1970, went down to 8.4% and 7.2%, respectively, and replaced by manufacturing, from a traditional 13.9% of the GDP in 1970 to 30.9% in 2003. There was a clear shift from a largely agricultural to a manufacturing status. Currently, Malaysia is among the world's largest exporters of semiconductor devices, electrical goods, and appliances. The U.S. hopes to transform Malaysia into a leading developer and producer of high-tech products, such as software, and the third major destination for outsourcing after China and India.

The U.S. remains one of the largest sources of new and foreign investments in Malaysia: with the cumulative American investments in Malaysia at more than $20 billion, 60% in the oil and gas and petrochemical sectors and the rest in manufacturing, particularly of semiconductors and other electronic products.