Wherever the Chinese have established themselves as significant minorities in the countries of Asia, the pattern of resentment and hostility toward them bears a remarkable resemblance to the reaction that has seen the Jews thrown out of a long list of European countries at one time or another and for similar reasons. It is therefore no surprise to find that the Chinese are widely known as "the Jews of Asia".
Ethnic Chinese now make up 25% of the Malaysian population - second only to Thailand in terms of Chinese minority size. Scattered widely throughout the country, Panang, the island connected to the mainland by bridge, is though the Chinese capital, as it were.
Small Chinese numbers were reported as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They didn't however begin arriving in force until significant deposits of tin were discovered in 1820. They were needed by the Malayan sultans and British colonists to labour in the mines. This would appear to indicate disdain for such work from the native Malays to whom agricultural pursuits and a measure of autonomy were traditional.
In 1839 Goodyear perfected the vulcanisation of rubber. A wide open market and a demand for the product ensued. The climate and soil of Malaya were recognised as ideal prerequisites for growing rubber plants. The need for plantation workers triggered another wave of Chinese immigration, the locals once again preferring to be their own bosses in their rice paddies.
Following a pattern established wherever Chinese have settled in numbers, these impoverished workers, through energy, thrift and networking, quickly elevated themselves to people of means, with a seemingly innate and uncanny ability to turn money into more money and small businesses into larger businesses. The Malays meanwhile were happy to plod along in subsistence farming, sometimes if lucky, resulting in moderately profitable surpluses.
Even at the very beginning of these trends, a crystal ball would not have been needed to foresee the inevitable results: the Chinese, never really accepted as fellow citizens but rather as interlopers - the clannish of the Chinese not mitigating this perception - controlling the wealth of the country while the still impoverished Malays smouldered with resentment. 1969 was this pressure cooker exploding. When the smoke cleared and dust settled the body count began. Estimates of Chinese dead vary widely but the respected writer, Amy Chua, in her book World on Fire gives a figure of around one thousand.
This however wasn't the first indication of the difficulty of two distinctly different races sharing the same living space - just the worst. Race riots had occurred in '57, '59, '64 and '67. Riots occurring in Singapore in '64 caused the city-state to be booted out of the Malaysian Federation formed only the previous year. The two-nation federation of course collapsed but the newly divorced northern partner opted to retain the name "Malaysia".
The destruction and bloodshed of 1969 was living (and dying) proof that the battle cry of the French Revolution - "liberty, equality, fraternity" - was simply empty rhetoric. There can be liberty OR equality. There can't be both. The liberty existing in Malaysia enabled a ruthlessly capitalistic-minded segment of the population to dominate a far less financially aggressive indigenous people who by and large were content to do what they had always done: live off the land in their timeless kampongs. These were the Bumiputra, or sons of soil. A moniker like that clearly tended to anchor them much deeper in the homeland than the Chinese "newcomers" and begged for protection as a national treasure.
In the aftermath of the death and destruction, Malaysia's first prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman resigned and a state of emergency was declared. Malaysian authorities, shocked and faced with the prospect of further, possibly escalating violence, were confronted with the enormous but unavoidable task of (in economic-speak) "levelling the playing field". What they came up with sounded faintly like something lifted from a 1930's Soviet hand-book for apparatchiks. It was entitled the New Economic Plan or NEP.
The socio-political justification for NEP was that:
| "National Unity is unattainable without greater equity and balance among Malaysia's social and ethnic groups in their participation in the development of the country and in the sharing of the benefits from modernization and economic growth. National Unity cannot be fostered if vast sections of the population remain poor and if sufficient productive employment opportunities are not created for the expanding labour force" |
This was a nice way of saying that the avaricious Chinese would be henceforth as heavily handicapped as Tulloch in the running of the 1960 Melbourne Cup. More importantly, it would be now extremely difficult for Chinese hands to grip the levers of political power.
Not particularly interested in the political sphere but almost as interested in making money as the Chinese was the third major component of Malaysian society, the Indian community, which also stood above the Malays in economic terms. The South East Asian version of affirmative action would also militate against them.
The NEP was up and running by 1971. Broadly, it was geared to redistribute the national wealth of the Malays from 2.4 % to 30% via concomitant increase in the ownership of enterprise. Well funded training schemes were established with the goal of rapidly and significantly boosting Malay employment in the public sector.
The most controversial of the initiatives taken was the quota system placed on entrance to tertiary education. The effect of this was the shutting out of Chinese and other non-Malay students from education. This saw an explosion in the numbers of Malaysian-Chinese studying in Australian universities (and effectively shutting out Australian students from higher education). It had the additional unfortunate after-effects of getting Australian educational institutions addicted to overseas student fees and blowing a backdoor into Australia for Chinese students easily able to acheive residency and naturalisation after the completion of their studies. The NEP lasted until 1991 when it was succeeded by the National Development Policy which relaxed some of the harsher aspects of the preceding policy, an unintended consequence of which was a "brain drain" causing damage to Malaysian society as a whole.
Although the NEP was presented as a mechanism for lifting the bottom levels of Malaysian society out of dire poverty, there was no hiding the fact that a zero sum game was being played - for every grinning winner there was a sad-faced loser and that face was heavily Chinese. There was no point even attempting to hide the barefaced lying involved, the most egregious example being that the policy was wholly race-based with no concern for social/economic class. This meant that even rich Malays were able to benefit from the scheme while impoverished Chinese and others not categorised as Bumiputra were left to struggle on their own
Which ever way it is cut, the NEP was racism institutionalised. If anything like this had ever been attempted in a white country, that is, providing hefty advantages to the native whites, it would be South Africa all over again with liberals frothing and spitting and shrieking for the immediate destruction of that country. But non-white countries naturally receive a pass, and this is because .... oh the agony of the paradox confronting saintly leftist/liberals - the same level of moral evolution is not really expected of non-whites. How to escape the inescapable, thinly veiled conclusion that this also is an expression of racism? Best not to talk about it.
But what was Malaysia to do, allow its natives to be eaten alive, allow it's country to be taken from its rightful owners, it's wealth expropriated, to simply lie down and die? No, only white countries are stupid enough to do that.
Not particularly interested in the political sphere but almost as interested in making money as the Chinese was the third major component of Malaysian society, the Indian community, which also stood above the Malays in economic terms. The South East Asian version of affirmative action would also militate against them.
The NEP was up and running by 1971. Broadly, it was geared to redistribute the national wealth of the Malays from 2.4 % to 30% via concomitant increase in the ownership of enterprise. Well funded training schemes were established with the goal of rapidly and significantly boosting Malay employment in the public sector.
The most controversial of the initiatives taken was the quota system placed on entrance to tertiary education. The effect of this was the shutting out of Chinese and other non-Malay students from education. This saw an explosion in the numbers of Malaysian-Chinese studying in Australian universities (and effectively shutting out Australian students from higher education). It had the additional unfortunate after-effects of getting Australian educational institutions addicted to overseas student fees and blowing a backdoor into Australia for Chinese students easily able to acheive residency and naturalisation after the completion of their studies. The NEP lasted until 1991 when it was succeeded by the National Development Policy which relaxed some of the harsher aspects of the preceding policy, an unintended consequence of which was a "brain drain" causing damage to Malaysian society as a whole.
Although the NEP was presented as a mechanism for lifting the bottom levels of Malaysian society out of dire poverty, there was no hiding the fact that a zero sum game was being played - for every grinning winner there was a sad-faced loser and that face was heavily Chinese. There was no point even attempting to hide the barefaced lying involved, the most egregious example being that the policy was wholly race-based with no concern for social/economic class. This meant that even rich Malays were able to benefit from the scheme while impoverished Chinese and others not categorised as Bumiputra were left to struggle on their own
Which ever way it is cut, the NEP was racism institutionalised. If anything like this had ever been attempted in a white country, that is, providing hefty advantages to the native whites, it would be South Africa all over again with liberals frothing and spitting and shrieking for the immediate destruction of that country. But non-white countries naturally receive a pass, and this is because .... oh the agony of the paradox confronting saintly leftist/liberals - the same level of moral evolution is not really expected of non-whites. How to escape the inescapable, thinly veiled conclusion that this also is an expression of racism? Best not to talk about it.
But what was Malaysia to do, allow its natives to be eaten alive, allow it's country to be taken from its rightful owners, it's wealth expropriated, to simply lie down and die? No, only white countries are stupid enough to do that.
"But what was Malaysia to do, allow its natives to be eaten alive, allow it's country to be taken from its rightful owners, it's wealth expropriated, to simply lie down and die? No, only white countries are stupid enough to do that."
ReplyDeleteYes. Under jewish rule everyone but Whites are allowed to assert their interests lest we be called "racist haters", that guilt us back into the line that eventually will terminate with our destruction.
Organized jewry has indoctrinated, poisoned, Whites into playing by rules of "fairness" that no other ethnic or racial groups plays by, thereby ensuring our demise if we don't break out of their mental prison.
As you write, the Malaysians did it, and so must White Australians do it.
Stop immigration. Eject the invaders. Hang the traitors.
Thank you katana. Thanks for letting me know I'm hitting the mark.
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