Government-mandated preferential treatment in Malaysia

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Compassion Versus Guilt. pp. 204 - 207

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Malaise in Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur is the capital of Malaysia. But you would never know it by looking at the names of its stores, factories, and other businesses.

Chinese names abound on business signs, though the Chinese are a minority in Malaysia. Foreign companies are also common. Hitachi and other Japanese firms have branches here. So do American companies. Malay businesses are the exception rather than the rule.

This is not an unusual situation in the history of nations and peoples. But it is no less painful to the Malays or politically dangerous to the Chinese. At one time, people from India owned most of the businesses in several east African countries. Western Europeans and Americans dominated many industries in czarist Russia. Jews, Armenians, and Lebanese have had similar economic prominence in various nations around the world.

In all these cases, however, local resentments have been fierce, and occasionally bloody. Malaysia is no exception. Malaysia's last great race riot occurred 15 years ago, when Malays unleashed an orgy of destruction and slaughter on the Chinese community. Things have been quiet in recent years—but at a price.

That price has been government-mandated discrimination against people who are not of the Malay race, regardless of whether they are citizens of the country. This racial discrimination is expressed politically as preferences or quotas for the Bumiputras or "sons of the soil." A citizen of Chinese or Indian ancestry is never considered a native son, no matter how many generations his family has lived in this country.

That means that anyone not of the Malay race faces official discrimination across the board—not just in government employment but also in private employment, university admissions, and in virtually every aspect of Malaysian life. In a multi-page advertisement in Fortune magazine, the Malaysian government openly declared to foreign companies that they would have to follow race-based employment policies in Malaysia.

Another part of the price of racial peace is a federal law against criticism of the nation's racial policy. It is literally a crime to protest. No such organization as the N.A.A.C.P. could exist legally in Malaysia. Foreigners have been expelled merely for trying to do research on Malaysia's racial policies.

Malaysia is a classic example of how the plain fact of economic differences among groups can be politically escalated into an issue that threatens the peace and stability of a nation. Generations ago, in colonial Malaya, poor and ill-educated Chinese immigrants came into the country to do much of the hard and dirty work in the tin mines and elsewhere. People from India were brought in to work on the rubber plantations.

By and large, Malays did not have to stoop to these kinds of jobs. They were peasants with their own land, in a country where climate and soil guaranteed them subsistence, without undue toil and with considerable leisure. They developed an easy-going, graceful, but economically inefficient way of life.

The Chinese came from a country where life was never that easy. In much of China, it was a full-time job to produce enough to keep body and soul together. The workaholic attitudes this produced have marked the Chinese in countries from Peru to Australia. Malaysian Chinese are no exception.

Beginning with little more than the clothes on their backs, the Chinese saved much of the money they earned as unskilled laborers. Years later, they had their own tiny businesses. Generations later, they were earning double the income of the Malays.

From a purely economic point of view, the productivity and thrift of the Chinese were to everyone's advantage. Malays retained much of their traditional way of life, while also enjoying some of the modern amenities made possible by the businesses, industries, and financial credit created by the Chinese. But politically, the situation became explosive.

The whole modern economic structure in Malaysia, created largely by the Chinese and by foreigners, is today seen politically as something "taken over" by them. It is almost as if whole industries came into existence by themselves—or "somehow"—and alien elements then grabbed control of them. Such is the magic of political rhetoric.

—November 20, 1984

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31 May 2024