A Review on Wong’s 1946 Series

【A】 1946 Question

(1) 1946 Question

The 1946 series by Wong Chin Huat is a series of columns published in The Malaysian Insider – a popular news website in Malaysia – between July 2^nd and December 31^st 2014. In his very first column, Wong states that all fundamental issues of Malaysia, be it communalism, language policy, or religion, need to be traced all the way back to 1946, the year when Malaya commenced its process of decolonization and nation-building after the British return. With its large number of unassimilated immigrants (up to almost 50%), “the 1946 question” is a fundamental question of nation-building project; “can citizens be different yet equal?” To explore the question deeply and systematically, Wong addresses the issues of multiculturalism, secularism, democracy, federalism, historical narrative, and economic empowerment in his following columns and eventually provides a wholly-new alternative of Malaysia’s nation-building.

(2) The Tension of “Yes” and “No”

The contemporary Malaysia history is largely a tension between “yes” and “no” to the 1946 question, which can be seen as follows:

1946	Malayan Union	Yes
1948	The Federation of Malaya	No
1957	Merdeka Compromise	Compromise
1963	Malaysia	-	Cold world & Communalism
1965	Secession of Singapore	Yes
1969 1071	May 13th New Economic Policy	No
2008	Political Tsunami	-	Disappointment to UMNO’s governance
Post- 2008	The Rise of Malay-Muslim Conservative and Civil Society Groups	The Escalation of “Yes VS No” conflict

(The table cannot fully represent Wong’s view as I add my own view or important events which I think is compatible with the framework, i.e. the events of 1965, 2008, and post-2008)

【B】The Reality We Face

(3) The Root Cause: “Reinforcing Cleavages”

     & An Overlooked Problem: First-past-the-post (FPTP)

Contrary to popular opinion, Wong argues that the root cause of the 1946 question and is not excessive diversity; it is “reinforcing cleavages” instead, which is in contrast to “cross-cutting cleavages”. The concept of “cleavages” means divisions which can produce conflict and disagreement among the population over politics and policy; if cleavages overlap with rather than cut across each other, it is called “reinforcing cleavages”. Back to 1946, Malayans face two kind of reinforcing cleavages: first, the “ethnicity- (language-religion-custom)” cleavage; second, more importantly, the “ethnicity-class” cleavage as most Malays are generally less well-off than immigrant groups, especially Chinese. Such situation naturally leads to a sense of insecurity among Malays.

Wong also points out that FPTP is an overlooked problem which in fact intensifies Malaysia’s ethnic conflict. To begin with, FPTP election is a game of winner-takes-all and therefore a gamble for political parties; an electoral fortune may change greatly with much smaller swing in votes. Second, if there is a third-concerned fight, the ruling party need not loses votes to lose seats as long as its opponents unite together. Under this system, if UMNO is to win elections, it must exploit the insecurity of ethnic majority they claim to champion.

(4) How UMNO Consolidates Its Reign?

The establishment of UMNO and its incomparable influence over the country throughout nearly 70 years is based on a big “NO” of Malay community to 1946 question. To strengthen its rule over the country, UMNO has been making every effort to reinforce the “NO”. If we are eager to transform the path of Malaysia’s nation-building, it is necessary to understand all UMNO’s tactics.

Though UMNO’s priority is to ensure Malay dominance, its leaders need to take the country’s stability into account. Besides, the fact that Tun Razak did not opt for a de jure one-party state and full ethnocracy after 13^th May implies that Malay conservative elites might like to preserve a certain degree of democracy. Therefore, the erosion of minority power has been conducted in Tango manner, “two step forward, one step back”. A semblance of compromise and negotiability will ease the tension between UMNO and minority group. In addition, UMNO also increases ministerial posts and parliamentary seats to share interests with its allies and therefore satisfy their demands.

  

On the other hand, UMNO has been reinforcing the cleavages between MMB (Muslim-Malay-Bumiputera) and NNN (non-Muslim-non-Malay-non-Bumiputera), enlarging the numbers of MMB, making MMB their staunch supporters, and amplifying their electoral power. Its methods are as follow: 1) The formula of “Muslim = Malay = Bumiputera” serves a tool to reinforce the existing cleavages, especially the privilege enjoyed by Bumiputera; 2) The status of Bumiputera as inducement for Indonesia immigrants to naturalize and for East Malaysian natives to convert to Islam; 3) One-way conversion indicating no exit for this MMB; 4) Undermine Malay to make monolingual Malay intellectually inferior and restrict all actions against authority, e.g. “I want to touch dog” campaign; 5) constituency malapportionment and gerrymandering.

Last but not least, Sedition Act serves as the legal weapon – whose role used to be played by ISA before abolishment of the latter - to which UMNO always invoke to oppress anyone challenging the political and religious authority, regardless of MMB or NNN.

(5) Only Malay-Muslim can save Malaysia’s Pluralism

Facing all discriminationist policies by the state, non-Malay withdraw to their own ghettos and even discriminate against Malay in the sphere of market of society, which naturally creates a vicious circle. However, non-Malays have lost their veto power due to two reasons: 1) the constitution is not reliable because the parliament and judiciary is firmly controlled by the ruling party; 2) while they are not able to impose any substantial security or economic threat to the authority, they lost their electoral power since GE13 because UMNO seems to give up their effort to win over non-Malay votes. By redelineating constituency which only demands simple majority, UMNO is theoretically able to rule the country by solely Malay votes. Therefore, what we need to do is to win over Malay as they are the only community which can save Malaysia’s pluralism. 

【C】 Transformational Nation-Building

(6) Selling “illegitimate trio” to Malay-Muslim

The “illegitimate trio” refers to multiculturalism, secularism, and democracy, which are allegedly undesirable by-products brought by British colonial government in official historical narrative; in many Malay’s belief, they would have lived in a land fully enjoyed and controlled by Malays and would not have needed to tolerate these ideas if there had been no British colonization. More seriously, these ideas might jeopardize Malay dominance even until now. For them, therefore, the trio are illegitimate ideas which need to be tolerated and contained instead of being celebrated. To shift the view, we need to 1) to reconstruct national history, which I will introduce in the following section; 2) to convince Malay-Muslims that the trio is not only unharmful but also beneficial to them.

When Wong discuss about multiculturalism, he mainly analyses Malaysia’s multi-stream education system. There are basically three points in his relating articles: 1) the system is necessary for different communities as mother tongue, which he refers to cradle tongue, is of utmost importance for quality education; 2) we do not need to sacrifice the system for the sake of national unity as different streams of education system, such as Chinese school, can accommodate different ethnicities as English schools did in the past; in that case, language will not be an ethnic marker of different linguistic community and thereby breaks reinforcing cleavage; 3) promoting Malay as national language does not necessitate the restriction of linguistic freedom as people can be trained to be multilingual. In addition, it should be the right of parents and children to choose schools and their responsibility to bear the outcome; instead of making decisions for them, government should just satisfy their demands.

As he probably deem the importance of democracy as common knowledge, he does not elaborate the point and instead focus on another one: as democracy is a game of number count, how can it be detrimental to the majority? How can minority manage to threaten Malay dominance without the consent of Malay majority? When he put such question, “[…] why should Malays be prevented from thinking and making their informed decision, by self-proclaimed defenders of their rights?”, for me, he has given the answer why the authority uses its all means to restrict democracy: it aims to leave no room for the majority to be persuaded. In short, democracy is not harmful to Malay; it is just dangerous to the party which claims to represent Malay.

Though he understands the resentment against secularism among Malay-Muslim can be traced back to the legacy of Kemal in Turkey and that of British in Malaya, he illustrates the origin of secularism in the west and suggests that it does not only beneficial to resolve the tension between Islam and other religions, but also different denominations of Islam, e.g. Sunni and Shia.

(7) A New History Narrative: Nusantara + British Legacy

As mentioned above, the obsession with anti-colonial sentiment and mindset of Malay “Bumiputeranism” and dominance, which are transmitted from the official history, are one of the main barriers for Malay-Muslim to embrace the British legacy. Put aside its negative impact, the official history is biased and ignorant of important historical facts in the first place. Hence, it is necessary to reconstruct our historical narrative.

There are at least three important facts which are overlooked in official history: 1) mass immigration was more the outcome of capitalist development than that of British colonization; besides, many Chinese immigrants of Johor, Selangor, and Perak were recruited by Malay aristocrats themselves; 2) British colonial government was not entirely the enemy of Malay aristocrats; instead, they had a certain degree of co-operation during the colonial era; 3) most importantly, the official history which traces Malaysia’s origin to Malacca Sultanate disregards the history of East Malaysia. Accordingly, an alternative to our official history should feature: 1) Malaysia as the successor of British colonial states; 2) democratization throughout Malaysia as the process of decolonization; 3) British legacies, e.g. “illegitimate trio” and English, as our fortune. 

On the other hand, such history account should also demonstrate the continuity between our contemporary history as the post-British colonial state and Nusantara past, which features a great civilization with its hybrid nature, Malay as its lingua franca, Islam as its most popular religion. (NB. For me, the benefit of emphasizing Nusantara past instead of Malacca Sultanate is that the former encompass East Malaysia as well.) Therefore, there is no doubt that we should also promote Malay as our national language without sacrificing linguistic freedom of other languages and upheld Islam as national religion in the model of Westphalian secularism.

An historical account incorporating Nusantara past and British legacy is then able to include the history of West Malaysia and East Malaysia. Though the inclusion of East Malaysia is out of the calculation of cold war and communalism of West Malaysia, it does not mean that we cannot redress the problem caused by the historical mistake from now; such historical account enable us is the first step as it enable us to correctly understand the supposedly equal partnership between these two regions. With this history account as our consensus, we are not only mentally prepared to inherit Nusantara and British legacy, but also to implement the real federalism which granting more self-government right to East Malaysia.

 (8) Economic Empowerment: Securitization of Malay-Muslim

As the reinforcing cleavage between ethnicity and class is the most important reason which causes Malay insecurity, empowerment of Malay-Muslim is the prerequisite for a new nation-building project. As NEP has its inherent flaws, i.e. statist assumption, mono-ethnic support, violence as its guarantor, we must provide a new alternative to NEP which is able to empower all the disadvantaged of all ethnicities throughout the country. In those relating articles, the title of an article, “multi-ethnic competition for Malay agenda” reminds us that the new empowerment project should completely break the perception that “only Malay can save Malay”.

(9) Transforming Political System: Preventing Political Dominance & Gamble

In order to make election more competitive yet less volatile, there are two major transformations need to be made in the political system: 1) decentralization for preventing political dominance (more competitive); 2) a transformation of electoral system to preclude political gamble (less volatile).

For decentralization, he suggests that more power should be devolved to states, local councils, and fully-elected senates. Moreover, third-tiered administrative divisions (e.g. cities, districts), which are comfortably dominated by a substantial ethnoreligious majority, should be created; in that case, voters have no psychological need to echo slogans like Malay Unity or Chinese Unity.

As the system of first-past-the-post (FPTP) can easily bring about huge change of electoral outcome with much smaller swing in votes, it should be replaced by the system of mixed-member-proportional (MMP). In the latter system, voters would have two votes, one vote for the constituency MP and the other vote for their favourite party who can list their candidates on a party list. By deciding the parties’ seat shares on their party vote shares, this ensures highly proportional representation, completely eliminating the need for malapportionment, gerrymandering, and voter transfer. In addition, we will like to have four or five parties under such system. In multi-party system, political parties are required to win minimum 5% of party votes before being allocated any party-list seat. These parties will likely have to form coalitions to govern, and are hence forced to be moderate.

He also suggest to empower parliament by transforming parties to be “internally-made parties”, where party leadership is elected by their parliamentarians, rather than their delegates. We can further democratise the parties by letting party members choose their candidates for geographical constituencies, as well as those on party list.