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Ethnic structure, inequality and governance of the public sector in malaysia
Teik, Khoo Boo
Teik, Khoo Boo
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Abstract
"In multiethnic societies, socio-economic indicators as differential levels of income, incidences of household poverty, rates of ownership of share capital, and proportions of participation in select categories of employment, are commonly correlated to ethnicity to show disparities between ethnic groups. Yet, fundamentally, socio-economic inequalities can rarely be explained by ethnicity alone. Even rigid structural interethnic inequalities imposed and maintained by blatant and systematic practices of ethnic discrimination typically reflect “race and class” divisions. However, “ethnic narratives” of power, wealth and poverty, which emphasize interethnic disparities without reference to class structures of political economy, are too often compelling. These narratives make it politically urgent, if difficult, to prevent divisive juxtapositions of the fortunes of certain communities against the deprivations of others, as if the communities are monolithic blocs locked into a zero-sum game that renders the fortunes of the one the misfortunes of the other. The political economy of Malaysia provides an instructive example of how a multiethnic society has been burdened by different ethnic “imbalances” – fundamentally, between the ‘indigenous community” and “immigrant communities” – that created formidable barriers to non-divisive interethnic relations. In particular, the contrast between the “poverty of the (indigenous) Malays” and “the wealth of the (immigrant) Chinese” was politically volatile since the Malay-Chinese disparities were embedded in a division of labour that was structured by colonial capitalism but that persisted after decolonization. In fact, Malaysian political economy was Janus-like: its ethnic aspect was constantly exposed while its class aspect was hidden. Thus, the structures of political economy and the inequalities they bore were susceptible to political mobilization that seized upon real and “perceived” ethnic differences. In the absence of creative and popular syntheses of strands of Malay, Chinese and Indian nationalisms (which were active in colonial times), “nation-building” was itself ethnicized, cast in narratives of the relative abilities of different “races”, their comparative competitiveness, and their contrasting attainments. Or, as an important study of Malay nationalism once noted, popular imagination easily counterposed a “rags-to-riches” story of the (non-Malay) migrant to a “master-to-menial” story of the (Malay) indigene."(pg 5)
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2000
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