Yao Souchou. Globalization and Its Counter-forces in Southeast Asia. Editor: Terence Chong. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008.
Introduction: “Regressive and Archaic Institutions”
Chinese education has a “troubled history” in Malaysia. In the West a strong case is being made about the importance of vernacular schools in producing multi-lingual, multi-cultural and cosmopolitan “polyglot citizens”. This argument about cultural citizenship is largely ignored by the state and the progressive circles in Malaysia; any departure from the state-controlled education is “suffused with anxiety, emotion, and controversy, lending itself so easily to ‘politicization’”. Indeed to the state and the critics of vernacular schools, Chinese community’s passionate hold to their need to run their schools and educate their children sounds almost fanatical and quaintly out-of-place in modern, multi-cultural Malaysia. It is striking that at a time when struggle for cultural citizenship is gaining ground in many parts of the world, Chinese education is still charged with so many sins of cultural chauvinism and anti-national development.
Barely two decades ago, in March 1983, key organizations of the Chinese community presented to Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports a Joint Memorandum on National Culture. Superficially the memorandum was in response to a series of events over the past few years: the announcement of the government intention to review measures to forge a national culture; the foreign minister’s speech in the opening of an exhibition of Turkish art, suggesting that only features of art “based on the Malay identity could be accepted as element of national culture”; and more prosaically, the police refusal to grant permission for Chinese clubs to perform the lion dance in public places. In March-April 1984 the local English daily, The Star, sponsored a debate on national culture; in the passionate exchanges that ensued the issue of Chinese vernacular was brought up. With few exceptions, the opinions of writers — English-educated academics, Malay intellectuals and NGO activists — were universally negative on the role of Chinese schools. These were individuals of impeccable liberal credentials and few could be accused of having put themselves behind the unsavoury policy of the state of various kinds. Broadly unified in their derision that Chinese schools, they make a somewhat surreal picture of progressive intellectuals relentlessly coming down hard on the aspirations of a culturally-marginalized community — even if these aspirations are not ideologically above suspicion, as I shall show.
For academics Maznah Mohamed and Johan Saravanamutu, the debate on vernacular schools is locked in their “primary perspective”: “the inexorable logic and inevitable need for ultimate assimilation among Malaysia’s various ethnic groups”. If the “inexorable logic and inevitable need” sounds slightly Stalinist, the “ultimate assimilation” is nonetheless meant to offer national benefit. “The greater the degree of natural assimilation processes … the greater would be the opportunity to evolve and forge a truly genuine national culture”, they write. Like a secret love declaring its irrepressible intentions, the authors coyly lift the veil of their polemics. Vernacular schools cannot be condoned, they assert, because they produce “ethnic chauvinism” and thus enhance “racial polarization”. Not that they are blind to the primary cause all this, as they identify the Malay-oriented New Economic Policy (NEP) as failing to correct “socio-economic inequality” and having “exacerbated ethnic tensions … and [bred] misperceptions and distorted consciousness about the true function of culture”. And for them the “true function of culture” is to facilitate “the assimilationist approach” to Malaysian politics. Here the corpse of history is revived. Since in colonial Malaya, pluralism is merely another name for race, pluralism thus leads to “discord, ethnic mistrust and riots”, and results in ethnic chauvinism by creating “superracial” attributes to some ethnic groups.
Mohd Nasir Hashim and K.S. Jomo in their joint commentary too begin by lamenting the state of “national culture” and its complex origins and social effects. Colonialism is also brought up. For them Malaysia sadly lacks a history of popularist anti-imperial struggle like the one that took place in Indonesia, for it would have built the foundation for a well-integrated “national culture”. They point to the failures of the state in many spheres, especially in providing an “official school system” that has failed to meet the linguistic and cultural aspirations of the ethnic communities. As a result the communities have little choice but to establish vernacular schools, and this can be, to an extent, defended. But the hesitant voice is muffled by a great deal of qualification: “it is not desirable for school children to be segregated along ethnic or class lines, eg. with vernacular schooling systems (ostensibly separate but equal) or boarding schools for a privileged few.”
Here neo-Marxist class analysis quietly makes its appearance. In a moment bespoken of crude Frankfurt School, the “cultural agenda” of vernacular schools is made to associate with the practice of power which parasitically uses culture and tradition for its own ends. As they write, “[T]he existence of slavery, feudalism and emperors in Malay, Chinese and Indian history should not be invoked to legitimise the revival of such regressive and archaic institutions today.” This is arguably a bit of a long shot. In another letter, Jomo has written more equivocally of the colonial heritage of the Chinese schools; in his words, the “vernacular school system inherited from the colonial era continued to segregate school children along linguistic and racial lines.” Colonial policy — this time “divide and rule” — is again evoked to do rhetorical work, as if colonialism in Malaya is the “heart of darkness” of the Belgian Congo and colonial policy was not also about modern education, health and sanitation, and economic opportunities that allowed tens of thousands of immigrants to escape from the poverty and misery at home.
All this, however, is not to let off easily the Chinese education movement, for it too carries convoluted desires and cultural ambitions made increasingly anachronistic by globalization. For the moment, one cannot but notice that among the critics and opponents, much is made of the fact that Chinese vernacular schools are creating social divisions within the nation. How this happens is not clear. To make the argument stick it would need to show that the Chinese school curriculum and learning experiences have made students hostile to the cultures and aspirations of non-Chinese, as they busily deride all that the Malaysian nation stands for. In short, the critics are certain that Chinese schools do not produce nationalists and loyal citizens and are thus injurious to “national integration”.
These are rather fantastical charges. Given the nature of state politics in Malaysia, the vision for a “culturally integrated” Malaysia makes these critics strangely complicit with the state, just as they are wanting in ideological astuteness and cosmopolitan spirit. A series of question can be asked in the context: What is it that drives the passion of the critics? Why do Chinese schools so easily evoke the anxiety about “cultural polarization”?; and most importantly, do Chinese vernacular schools indeed produce students who are anti-national and intolerant to other communities? These questions raise important analytical and ethical issues, ones about citizenship rights and its limits, about cultural self-determination and nationalist fantasy. At the same time globalization and transnational cultural movement have a great deal of relevance to these issues. Both Chinese education and the Malaysian state are inescapably affected by the transnational forces. As they respond in their different ways to “human resources needs” of rapid economic development, they also confront the cosmopolitan pressures that come with it. Capitalist modernity, to re-run the classic argument of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto, breaks up local values and traditional self-possessions. Under globalization the whole idea of national integration as much as that of Chinese vernacular education are radically changed. In this, I would like to suggest, Chinese education fares better than the forces that oppose it because it is inherently cosmopolitan. And history has much to do with this. For Chinese vernacular schools drew its original inspiration from the cultural reforms of early twentieth century China with their distinct progressive, modern nationalist vision. With borrowing from Japan and the West, both the cultural reform and its nationalist fervour were easily transmuted into cultural ambitions “beyond China” when it was exported to Chinese communities elsewhere. The historical heritage of internationalism — for I would call it that rather than globalization — gives Chinese schools its almost aggressive modern, cosmopolitan outlook: it is this outlook that explains their adaptability and the communal solidarity and resistance that sustain them.
The Sign of China
Chinese migrants to the South Seas brought with them cultural values that gave almost exaggerated importance to education. This is not only for the schooling of their children, but also for the preservation of traditions and literary skills. In the early colonial days, Chinese schools were left very much to themselves do this, and they would be funded by public donations and especially wealthy community leaders motivated, in varying degrees, by their cultural aspirations and the need for “buying face”. The first part of the nineteenth century saw the founding of shu-yuan or shu-guan or “literary academies” modelled on the sishu (private schools) and yizue (charitable or free schools) in late Qing China, providing students with joyless offerings of Confucianism and other text extolling importance of virtue and patriarchal values. The Wufu Shuyan (Academy of Five Blessings) established in Penang in 1819, Chongwen Ge (Chamber of Exalted Learning) founded in Singapore 1849, and Guiying Shuyuan (Congregation of Talent Academy) established in Singapore 1854 are some examples of schools of this type.
The nineteenth century was a time of tumultuous change for China. In the traffic between the homeland and Malaya, the exchange brought volatile stuff to the colony: the reformist Kang Yauwei and his ideas, the anti-Manchu revolution under Sun Yat-sen, and more generally the patriotism and nascent nationalism of the New China. Both Kang and Sun visited Penang and Singapore. The welcome they received translated into communal support and financial donation toward their causes, and some schools were directly linked to the movements they led. However export of “national politics” also brought cultural reform and assault on the feudal institutions and values of Old China. In China the pursuit of Chinese modernity was to flower into the May Fourth Movement of 1919. The May Fourth was an exuberant affair, animated by a mixture of nationalism, Western ideas and cosmopolitanism, as I shall show. And it is this “Chinese modern culture” that is the traceable heritage of the Chinese schools in Malaysia today.
In any case for the colonial authorities, all this was dangerously turning Malaya into the dumping ground of Chinese politics with its contentions and factional violence. Various legislations were introduced after 1919 to manage the Chinese schools in order to undercut the political influences from China, and perhaps to bring them in line with modern pedagogic goals of preparing students for jobs and vocations in Malaya; this is a vast subject beyond the scope of this chapter. In any case the pattern was thus set for the state perception that still affects the destiny of Chinese education today: community-supported vernacular schools as evidence of the immigrant races cultural intentions, and thus as sign of lack of allegiance to the Malaysian nation.
The present state of Chinese education reflects the compromises typical of Malaysian politics. It consists of state-funded national-type Chinese primary schools where Chinese is the main medium of instruction, and independent Chinese secondary schools financed and supported by Chinese community. In 2002 there were 700,000 students in the primary and secondary Chinese schools and the three tertiary colleges. The 1961 Education Act allowed Chinese secondary schools to be converted to government schools with English — replaced by Malay in the 1970s — the medium of instruction. Many did and the Chinese secondary schools today were those who refused in the last struggle against state manoeuvres. 1961 was the lowest point of the Chinese education movement when the government revoked the citizenship of its charismatic leader Lim Lian Geok. This is the heroic story of the Dong Jia Zong — the Malaysian Chinese Education Movement — with martyred Lim its “spiritual leader”. But the Education Act did not exactly spell the end of the community struggle. Since 1970s the Chinese School Management Boards and Committees in the Malaysian states started the revival of Chinese Independent Chinese School and got a great deal of community-wide support.
Currently the Dong Jia Zong is the key organization that ensures the success of this initiative; it is supported by teachers (the United Chinese School Teacher Associations of Malaysia) and the various broad members of Chinese schools (United Chinese School Committee’s Association of Malaysia). Part of the Dong Jia Zong is the Merdeka University Sdn Bhd — the limited company for setting up the now defunct Chinese private university when it was refused state licence in 1982 — which continues its effort to start up community tertiary colleges. These organizational links give a strong sense of the wide network of voluntary associations, teachers and professionals, wealthy merchants and capitalists in support of Chinese education, giving credence to its claim as a “community movement”.
Kua Kia Soong, a Manchester University-trained sociologist, is a key spokesperson of the Chinese education movement; he clarifies its central position:
[The vernacular schools] are really the expression of the Chinese community in this country to “freely develop their language and culture”, a right guaranteed in Article 1 of the 1966 Declaration of the Principles of International Cultural Cooperation, adopted by the General Conference of Unesco. … The basis of our national culture cannot be other than all the respective cultures that make up the cultural wealth of this country. … Like the question of assimilation, the evolution of a “Malaysian culture” is desirable if it is the product of a natural process, not and never as the result of government policy.
For Kua and his colleagues, what they want are both just and common sense. In their view, minorities in Malaysia have the right to promote and maintain their own cultures without having the heavy judgements of ethnic chauvinism landed on them. In the generous spirit of diversity and cultural self-determination, they reason, there should be no problem in pursuing ones cultural identity while remaining loyal citizens and supportive of the national development: rich ethnic cultures enrich the nation. For all the passionate insistence, however, it is also the fact that Chinese minority have conceded to the state’s agenda in many areas to the point of subservience. It has long accepted the key parameters of the Malaysian state — Islam as the nation’s religion, Malay as the official language and the “special positions” of Malays in the political and economic spheres. However, culture is the stuff of personal and collective identity, and for this reason is hard to let it go as easily as in other fields of national life.
Immigrant Imaginary
Cultural identity is complex and varied thing, and the term suggests at once too little and too much. Immigrants live — and dream and imagine — transnationally, across several lands and nations. Cultural globalization, whatever its conceptual difficulties, can help us understand this process. Having another home besides the one in which they now live, immigrants’ identity formation can be quixotic and nostalgic. Living across two places also means that they are often selective about the kinds of “cultural signs” of the homeland they would call up for such purpose. But that is how it should be. In Malaysia the virulent discriminatory policy has so infected the label “immigrants” that few Chinese would want to call themselves that. So China is now for them a place to visit or to make money; the more nationalistic among them would not even call themselves Chinese and prefer the term “Malaysians”. But immigrant imaginary is quite another thing, and could never be a direct and pragmatic affair. When leaders of the Chinese Education Movement insist on the right to promote Chinese language and culture in the schools, China is the “sign” where everything originates, yet also totally irrelevant in terms of what they are trying to achieve in contemporary Malaysia. China, particularly its modern cultural reform, is the historical inspiration of Chinese schools; but in the struggle for “cultural preservation” they have also moved far away from it. It is in this spirit that we should view the Chinese Education Movement.
On the historical influence of China, there should be nothing conspiratorial about this. Speaking of colonial Malaya, it would be strange indeed if Chinese immigrants did not bring their traditional culture and practices with them just as it would be if they did not eagerly learn about the social and political changes at home. After the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, “cultural exports” to the South Seas took a different turn: in additional to Confucian learning and feudal values were distinctive modern and nationalistic outlook. Chinese modernity rose from the ashes of the Opium War (1839-42). Another critical event was the disastrous “six months’ war” with Japan in 1894-95 that saw the annex of Taiwan and Southern Manchuria by the victor. For the formation of Chinese modern sensibility, the most crucial influence was the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Energized by anti-Japanese patriotism, and the betrayal of the League of Nations for failing to impede Japanese imperial ambitions in China, May Fourth harnessed political reform with a deep conviction of the power of “modern literature” in liberating Chinese sensibility from — in Lu Xun’s potent language — the cannibalistic hold of tradition and mass subservience. The New Cultural Movement signalled urgent political agenda, as well as new literary aesthetics.
These agenda and aesthetics were thus passionately “national”. But they were also universal and transnational — global is not quite the word — through their borrowing from the West, and Japan where many of the key Western texts were first translated. This borrowing had fuelled the late Qing reform crystallized in the slogan “China for essence, the West for use”: Western technology and ideas are for China’s modernization, and its cultural spirit remains Chinese. In the May Fourth, for example, the short stories of Lu Xu and Lao She may owe their form and technique to Flaubert, Chekov and Maupassant, but the themes are urgently national as they ply open all that were wrong with China, its feudal culture, its corrupt government, its subservient masses. Vera Schwarcz calls the May Fourth the project of Chinese Enlightenment, its cosmopolitanism was both local and universal, in the conflict between jiuguo and qimeng, between national salvation and enlightenment. In New Culture in a New World, Kenley describes in fascinating details the journey of the May Fourth to the South Seas. In Singapore writers turned the modern literary forms and cultural agenda of ambitions into new ways of engaging with local discernments. On the vernacular poetry in vogue in the 1930s, Kenley writes:
[It] addressed common themes to which large number of people could relate. Instead of writing about inspiring landscape or punctilious ceremonies, Singapore poets wrote of freedom, happiness, and love … Some drew inspirations from day-to-day events including train rides, money exchanges and military manoeuvres. In each case, the subject material for Singapore’s new poetry was distinct and unique from earlier poetic forms.
In the Chinese bookshop in Kuala Lumpur today, one finds short stories and essays by Malaysian Chinese writers in anthologies with titles like Ye Lin Wen Zhang (Literary Work of the Coconut Grove). One sees in such works the enduring traces of the May Fourth. For the Chinese intelligentsia — teachers, journalists, writers and secondary school students — in the South Seas, there was no other way to envision the new society except by harnessing the radical cultural reform and political changes that took place in China. The final flowering of Chinese modernity is World War II which began for China with Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1931, bringing its mixture of nationalism and progressive political and cultural sensibility to Malaya and Singapore. The boycott of Japanese goods by Chinese community had all the signs of a nascent mass movement involving students, workers and the community leaders. Labour union activism of the post-war years learned a great deal from this. And just as the radical vision of May Fourth turned to Western liberal ideas including Marxism and communism, post-war local yearning for a socialist future also allied itself with the communist united front. In all this “communism” is not enough to describe the complex desire and fervent imaginary that underlie the radicalism of the “Malayan Spring” — to Han Suyin’s term.
Local and Transnational
The Chinese modern is clearly capable of other lives when it is transplanted in foreign soil. If it aligned with Marxism and communism, there were other more elegiac articulations. In Chinese schools complex fusion of ethnic attachment, cultural memory and importantly, literary texts works to constitute the particular sense of being Chinese in Malaysia. This is how one comes to describe the learning experience in a Chinese school in Kuala Lumpur in the 1970s:
Educated in Confucius Chinese Middle School in Kuala Lumpur in the sixties, I remember my engagement with Chinese literary works as both complex and absorbing. The teaching of literature had been singularly designed to socialize us in the literary and ethical worth of classical texts. For three hours a day, we read, copied and took dictation from an anthology consisting of excerpts from basic works ranging from the philosophic writings of Mencius and Confucius to the poetry of Li Po and Su Dong Po, as well as the modern works of Lu Xun, Ding Ling and Ba Qing.
So what kind of cultural longing does Chinese education ultimately animate? A longing for “China” certainly:
In the crisscrossing of these agendas and state demands, where did we find inspirations for nurturing the sense of Chinese identity of which we refused to let go even in the mercurial political environment? … New intellectual resources were needed to help us negotiate through a rapidly changing political terrain. … We were looking for something that resounded with the best of our pedagogic experience: something ‘progressive’ and which at the same time satisfied our nascent literary taste.
But it is also a “Chinese sensibility” with notable Western, cosmopolitan pretension:
We found it … in translated Russian literature published by Foreign Languages Press of Beijing that were being sold in the shops in Kuala Lumpur. So we read, with the same studious devotion as we read Chinese classics, in Chinese, works of Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. From the same editorial hands, other progressive literature of the west also came to the World Bookshop in Petaling Street, the Chinatown quarters in Kuala Lumpur: works of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Jules Verne, Theodore Dreiser, Ibsen, Flaubert, Zola and many others.
This journey of cultural aspirations and political ambition between China and Malaysia suggests a rich tapestry of influences and desires hard to capture conceptually. There is something of cultural globalization and transnationalism, and the spread of modern texts also suggests what Anderson describes as the spread of “print capitalism” that contributes to the forming of an “imagined community”. But the sensibility nurtured by the Chinese schools is seeming more complex than that, and requires a new language perhaps like that of Foucault, to describe it.
In The Order of Things, Foucault says that he owes his inspiration to a story of Borges about a Chinese encyclopaedia that divides animals into some wonderfully absurd categories: belonging to the emperor, embalmed, tamed, sucking pigs, sirens and so on. The wonderment of the taxonomy sends him into a laughing fit:
… the disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the hetroclite; and that world should be taken in its most literal, etymological sense; in such a state, things are ‘laid’, ‘placed’, ‘arranged’ in sties so different from one another that is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all.
This kind of disorder, worse than “the incongruous”, leads him to formulate the idea of “heterotopias”. “Heterotopias has since then been much used in the literature to inscribe the kind of freedom that comes with globalization as people and their sentiments are no longer tied to one place. The idea, dealing as it does with the futility of discriminatory categories, is first of all about the ambiguity or multiple meanings of language. Under heterotopias’ assaults, the certainty of language — the transparency of words and connotations — crumbles up like ancient paper. “‘Heterotopias’ (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.”
What lends power to the idea of heterotopias is the way it quickly turns into a metaphor of space. For categories affects not only the order of things in our heads but also physically, how we actually systematically place them in space: the Chamberlain in the Chinese court would do this (if the Borges’s emperor indeed had such a collection as is described), so would the curator museum of natural history in our time when dealing with her collections of objects. Lying in the region beyond iron law of certainty and regimentation, heterotopias nonetheless has an order of a kind, with its own cultural scheme and liberating experience:
Thus, between the already ‘encoded’ eye and reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself; … [I]n every culture, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and its modes of being.
“Heterotopias” exist in every culture, Foucault insists, providing in its own way “the pure experiences of order and its modes of being”. However the “in-between space” of heterotopias is not “no space”, Foucault seems to suggest, but one providing a definite yet fragmentary experiences free from the conventional bounds imposed by language, categories and sentiments. It is a space that undermines established spatial order, if you like. The mobility of globalization across nations, cultures and regions is certainly this; so is the cultural consequence of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is only one of the ways in which globalization can give us an alternative way to live and to think. “Heterotopias” carry real social effects because they “organize a bit of the social world in a way different to that which surround them. The alternate ordering marks them out as Other and allows them to be seen as an example of an alternative way of doing things”.
The Chinese Modern as Heterotopia
Foucault’s concept of “heterotopias” is an attractive concept because it allows us, as Harvey suggests, “to think of the potential for coexistence in the multiple utopian schemes — feminist, anarchist, ecological, and socialist — that have come down to us through history”. The Marxist Harvey is a reluctant endorser of Foucault. Nonetheless there is considerable merit in tying globalization and its cosmopolitanism-making potentials to “heterotopias”. And with regards to the modern sensibility that gave Chinese schools their legacy, we have been struggling with terms suggestive of “internationalism”, “transnationalism” and even “globalization” but none would really do; Foucault’s lyrical celebration of the “space of disorder” may offer us a solution. If the Chinese modern is indeed a cultural configuration of heterotopias, then we can see it as an innovative alignment of old cultural ambitions and new yearnings, old China and locations in the South Seas and thus having the kind of freedom and mobility in the way Foucault has in mind. May Fourth in the tropics, Ye Lin Wen Zhang, the “Malayan Spring” and no less the pursuit of the West through translated work published in Beijing: these are arguably the odd and contradictory things of “heterotopias”.
But this, as much as Foucault’s conception, needs a qualification. If the concept of “heterotopias” indeed offers an alternative space of customary social practices, the freedom and mobility is contingent on some hard realities on the ground. It is surely a fantasy to think of movements of globalization as offering boundless freedom for all, from jet-setting academic to Mexican lettuce pickers in California. The post-modern desire for the “world as one” eventually has to face the spectre of the Real. And the Real is simply the material conditions that produce the freedom and opportunities as well as the exploitation and inequality of the late capitalist world; and in many Southeast Asian states, the very prohibition of bi-citizenship too, is a part of the Real that limits the mobility that globalization so abundantly promises. In any case, the particular qualities of the “Chinese modern in the tropics” suggest not the predatory borrowing from two places, but a figure of “heterotopias” that came out of cultural and political traffic from China to Malaya. It is a figure shaped by the situation at a time when immigrants still arrived — by large numbers, and China could still be “imagined” as the original homeland. National independence of course changed all that. Wang Gungwu’s pithy complaint about the popular use of the term “Chinese diaspora” is highly suggestive here. The term, with its historical references to the “wandering Jewry” and nostalgia for the imaginary homeland is problematic for describing the positions of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia facing various degrees of ethnic discrimination and violence. In this sense, Wang’s objection to the term is perhaps to save the Chinese in Southeast Asia from the disrepute of disloyalty in the nations where they live.
Yet when “immigrants” no longer wish to return to the “homeland”, and when they are a part of the nation, identity is still a matter of desire and cultural yearning, and for that an often uncertain affair. If in the past “immigrant imaginary” took Chinese community to draw inspiration from modern transformations in China and led them to invest in the education of their children, it now inspires “cultural connections” based on consumption and trade opportunities. Third China in the form of the Chinese global diaspora is sexily cosmopolitan and wealthy; and the cultural imaginary would traverse from the local to the burgeoning post-Deng China and to the “transnational Chinese community”. When Singaporean Chinese, for example, claims a Chinese identity, it is a particular Chinese-ness he or she has in mind. It is not, God forbid, something of the nostalgia for the struggle for socialism and equality of the past. Nor it is about wanting to take on the kind of Chinese-ness in the mainland, poor and unsophisticated and bordering on being the “Chinaman” of old. For all its difficult, contingent qualities, the immigrant imaginary still turns people to China for their desires and needs. If the earlier “diasporic communications” imported cultural nationalism and even communism to the local society, this round of transnational traffic has equally tantalizing offers but of another kind: of women in the karaoke lounges in Beijing, apartments in Shanghai affordable with strong Singapore dollar, and rewriting the lineage record in the village to celebrate, as in the past, the long ancestral glory.
In all this, both heterotopias and their constraints were the true story of the immigrant imaginary that so animated the drive for Chinese education. Heterotopias, insofar that they offer another kind of “pure experiences of order and its modes of being” speak not only of freedom and uncertainty; they are also a site of suppressed wishes and unfulfilled desires. It is for this reason that Chinese education has turned out to be a resilient project for the Chinese community in Malaysia. They refuse to let it go partly because the “immigrant imaginary”, so instinctive and natural even as the state would not allow it, continue to inspire and motivate. Of course both “immigrants” and “China” are no longer terms of currency in Malaysia, so that the immigrant imaginary has to do its work in secret as it takes on other names. Globalization certainly lends to the kind of cultural consumption of ‘China’ in the way spoken of. But “China” also continues to inspire the struggle for vernacular, mother-tongue education and motions as it did in the past to rework the longing for cultural self-determination and communal identity. In this context “China” is not so much the physical site as the sign of the Other Place in the imaginary.
“China” as a sign of immigrant imaginary helps to explain, among other things, why the Chinese education movement has been able to keep up with its struggle and energy from the colonial times until the present. Things have dramatically changed in contemporary Malaysia, of course; but state suppression and the denial of “immigrant imaginary” as legitimate cultural vision remain to a large measure the same. For the leaders and supporters of Chinese schools, it may well be that things have not changed very much. The political conditions further incite the communal longing for Chinese identity and education as the state attempts to suppress it. Nonetheless, the political and cultural landscape in which Chinese education movement has to operate now are rapidly changing. We can now speak of contemporary Malaysia and the world in terms of globalization proper. And we can fruitfully contrast the mobility of the past with that of the present. The cosmopolitan internationalism of the May Fourth, and transnationalism of the immigrant imaginary were underlined by movement of ideas and people that still recognized origins and places where they came and went to: they are transnational mobility of a particular sort. Globalization, more concisely, avows such origins and places: the mobility in its most rapacious traverses across and is often unhindered by national borders. Globalization is more literally, the making of “One World”. That is why when we think of globalization, it is most often transnational capital, and multinational corporations and their products that we think of because they are most powerfully capable of doing this. Certainly economic development in Malaysia over the last decades suggests globalization in this sense. The freedom of globalization’s mobility owes much to the power and momentum of transnational capital; it is also because we want it to come to our shores and make all kinds of ways to make this movement smoothly possible.
Globalization and Its Promises
The Dong Jia Zong is led by men of pragmatic views. The political zeal, when it is shown in the public, is less due to their contentious nature, but to the fact that they have been pushed to a corner by unfair state policy, so they say in interviews. The miscalculation of the Chinese education movement has been in thinking that by giving in to the political and economic demands — they even call their proposed university Merdeka University (“merdeka” is the Malay word for “independence”) — the state would, almost out of courtesy and a sense of fair play, grant them a space for them to practise what they believe to be just and reasonable. Globalization and capitalist development offer another kind of challenge. These processes open up the educational needs and opportunities, and the government is wise enough to see that it cannot manage and satisfy them alone.
The new fortune of Chinese education is the blessing of globalization, and the new story can be told from the window of the “human resources needs” of economic growth during the Mahathir years. Economic growth has opened up the education field. Chinese national primary schools have been for the past few years enjoying increased enrolment because of their excellent teaching and student performance. As the more nationalistic informants are eager to tell me, they are also attracting Malay and Indian pupils. But the most dramatic changes have been in the tertiary sector. In order to expand tertiary education, the state has allowed the establishment of de facto private universities in the form of privately-funded colleges with twinning programmes in partnership with Australian, UK and U.S. universities. Given the quotas in favour of Malay students in public universities, twinning colleges are almost exclusively attended by Chinese fee-paying students. At a time when the state is opening up the state education system, Chinese community continue to push for private university to cater for Chinese students who cannot find admission to public universities. In 1960s Merdeka University was started for such a purpose, but following the race riot of May 1969 it was refused government registration and the appeal was rejected by the high court. The change of fortune came in 2003 when the then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad led a ground-breaking ceremony to commemorate the founding of the Chinese-funded private University, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman or UTAR.
UTAR is symbolic of the new turn of Chinese education in Malaysia. The original “cultural investment” is now mediated by more practical curriculum to meet the demand of the new education market and the career-minded graduates of Chinese schools. At the same time, what has happened has to be seen in the national and cultural setting where many ethnic Chinese no longer adhere to “Chinese-ness” as major sign of self-identity. And it is a setting where Malay-Chinese antagonism is gradually being replaced by other forms division, particularly between secular Islam and fundamentalism, and where genuine cross-ethnic, cosmopolitan consciousness is gradually emerging. All these are arguably part of the effect of cultural globalization. Of course these changes have their limits. The state’s granting of university status is only restricted to a few private consortiums with the right political connections. UTAR is managed and funded by the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), a partner in the ruling party Barisan Nasional (BN). So some people are inclined to see this as “politicization of Chinese education”, as a vote-buying strategy for the MCA. Nonetheless given the huge uproar over the Mederka University, UTAR as the first de facto Chinese community-supported university comes across as a triumph of a certain sort, even for those in the Dong Jiao Zong circles.
Dong Jiao Zong has always been in the political wilderness. Its contentions are as much with the state as with the MCA which in its view has “sold out” on Chinese interests especially with regard to cultural issues. Fired up by the expanding education market, and evident loosing up of official regulations, Dong Jiao Zong is now actively trying to have a stake in the private tertiary education sector. There are now three colleges set up by Dong Jiao Zong. New Era College Malaysia is located in Kajang, outside Kuala Lumpur. The college website reads:
New Era’s [has] firm grounding in the community … Our tuition fees are at least half or even a third what the other colleges charge. The profit motive is simply not our motivating concern. Our energies are totally invested in enhancing academic standards and student welfare. We owe the community the promise of establishing an academic institution of distinction yet fulfilling our obligation of social responsibility.
With the first intake of students in March 1998, it offers five areas of studies: Chinese Language and Literature, Information Technology, Business Studies, Media Studies and Art and Design. The campus built on a 8.5-hectare old primary school site, is just ten minutes’ walk across from the Kajang train station. I spent an interesting afternoon talking to Kua Kia Soong, the education activist and principal of New Era. Lost on my way to the bookshop, I struck up a conversation with a small group of students gathering around the table-tennis game. They are students of Media Studies, and by the table, between their display of brilliant fore-strokes and waiting for turns, they tell me that they hope to work in public relations (“There is no money in newspapers”) and perhaps go overseas for postgraduate studies. We speak in Mandarin and switch to Malay and English for more abstract terms; their earnestness comes through in the quiet linguistic jumble. They have all come from independent Chinese secondary schools — in Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Alor Setar. I ask them what kind of education they received in the schools; they say that reading and writing Chinese is still important for them in Malaysia. But there is no triumphant elaboration of Chinese identity or struggle against government unfair policy. For most of them, poverty and poor English have put them in Chinese school, and the lofty agenda of the Chinese education movement seem far removed from their immediate concern of getting a useful and affordable education.
But the reminders of the original ambitions and cultural struggle are not far away. For New Era campus is also the headquarters of Dong Jiao Zong. In the bookshop one finds besides textbooks on accountancy, business management and Chinese studies, publications recounting the hardship and achievements of Chinese education in Malaysia. I bought a CD of the performance of a play based on the tragic life of activist Lim Lian Geok. Three Decades of Dong Jiao Zong in three volumes, prefaced by the calligraphy of its chairperson, comes in a red gift-box, an irresistibly good buy. Browsing in the bookshop, I feel the weight of the tropical heat, unrelieved by the weak air-conditioner as much as of the cultural memory and community ambitions that I know so well. Globalization has created the opportunities for Chinese education, yet taking it to a different, more pragmatic direction in a way that mutes its earlier driving agendas. New Era College seems richly suggestive of this: the concession to the state and “human resources” need of the market shows up the movement’s brilliant adaptability and ability for political survival, but also its cultural and ideological compromises as it necessarily has to in the conditions of state policy and globalization.
Conclusion
The movement of people, goods and ideas across the world is an old story; one told even before we invented the term “globalization”. The term in the current usage seems to have suffered because of the almost excessive endorsement by its proponents. The debate about the overall effects of globalization is, to say the least, highly partisan. So many good and bad things are being attributed to it — from the expanding Asian economies to the freedom of “transnational citizenship”, from the rupture of traditional values and communities to another turn of American cultural imperialism. Inevitably the response from the more sceptical is, “Well, Marco Polo’s journeys and the European discovery of the New World were globalization too!” This is, in a sense, not an unreasonable view. For to think of globalization as a somewhat unique phenomenon of the postmodern world of late capitalism is to forget that the movements of various sort across the world — and all that these movements imply — happened ever since human societies began. Nevertheless, things are not quite the same as before. The experience of “the world as one” today has an unmistakable density, a deepening, frenzied spread to cultures everywhere in a way that is hard to compared with “great transformations” of the previous eras. Technology too and the sheer speed by which news and information are exchanged give the current experience its unforgettable quality and texture. Deploying Foucault’s notion of “heterotopias”, we say that the (apparent) disorder of the globalizing world indeed has an order of a kind.
The lesson then, when turning to a concept like globalization, is that we have to avoid the pitfall of “historical uniqueness” while resisting the conclusion of “there is nothing new under the sun”. Globalization is best seen as part of the “moving story” of human history. In this continuum of a long stretch of historical process, the moving story would include not only globalization as such and the exciting compression of time and space of our postmodern experience. It must encompass the more prosaic traffic of people and ideas across nations and regions in the way we come to associate with Chinese historical migration to the South Seas. This is arguably a wider canvass than what the term globalization customarily draws. But in regard to Chinese education in Malaysia, it has the advantage of opening up the cultural inspirations and historical- ideological influences that traverse across nations and regions.
Above all, by looking at the internationalism of Chinese schools as a part of continuous historical movement, we are reminded that there is nothing conspiratorial about their social and cultural aspirations. This is simply the way of the immigrant imaginary. While all citizens share the homeland where they live, immigrants have other, historically more primary ones elsewhere; there should be nothing controversial about this. No amount of frantic call for “national development” and “ethnic integration” can disguise the violence and injustice, which suppresses this imaginary that, in turn, so energizes the Chinese education movement. Unity without diversity, in the past and the current postmodern times, is a travesty of state power. Just as globalization has benefited Chinese education by being allowed to set up private-funded tertiary colleges, it also plays up the “China connections” in somewhat striking ways. The government now allows Malaysian-Chinese to visit China. For them, if in the past immigrant imaginary took to drawing inspiration from modern transformations in China, it now inspires “cultural connections” based on consumption, trade opportunities and the nostalgia of “returning visits”. For all the difficult, contingent qualities, these are still something of the immigrant imaginary as people look to China for their own desire and needs. A local Malaysian sense of Chinese-ness, no longer of direct reference to the place but to its ethnic association, is no less a potential sign for cultural identity as for the Chinese education movement. This is a convoluted affair, as all matters of the imaginary have to be.
But Chinese education in the globalized world also brings up another issue: that of cultural citizenship. As a Malaysian-Chinese and writing from Australia, I notice with interest debate taking shape in North America and Europe about new conceptions of citizenship no longer depending on judicial and institutional definitions. Cultural citizenship emphasizes the right of people to fashion their cultural identities in an environment of diversity, difference and contested practices. One longs for a Habermas in Malaysia and Indonesia who has argued that the new European identity should include the cultures of Turks, Russians and other immigrants. Nineteenth century Malaya was a different time, but one can nonetheless think of Chinese education movement in Malaysia as the struggle for cultural citizenship as in the current debate. For all its mercurial air and passionate pronouncements, Dong Jia Zong’s argument is precisely that it is the right of Chinese to promote their culture and educate their youth without being cast as disloyal to the Malaysian nation. There is no contradiction in being a Chinese — in its most entangled senses — and a Malaysian. But this diverse cultural aspirations can only come from people who have the immigrants’ instinct: that here and there, “China” and Malaysia, could define one as Malayan without the disrepute that the state would like to imply. With the sense of hope that globalization invariably inspires, I would like to think transnational mobility and international pressures and trade necessities would eventually open up the suffocating parochialism and Malay racial hegemony so central to the Malaysian nation-state. If and when it happens, the Chinese education movement will not be the only beneficiary: the Malay community and the Malaysian nation can too prosper in the cosmopolitan ethos and modern economy in a future which ex-Prime Minister Mahathir has powerfully prescribed. It would also rid the nation a corrupting racially discriminatory policy that poisons all — especially its direct beneficiaries, the Malays.