Ambivalent Communities – (Malaysian) Chinese?

Chinese settlement in the Malay Peninsula and Western Borneo contributed greatly to the formation of both colonial society and later independent Malaysia. The Portuguese and later the Dutch established a colonial presence in the peninsula, but it was the British who, gaining control during the second half of the eighteenth century, recruited the first Chinese indentured labourers.

Early migrants worked in tin mines, cleared forests for agriculture and participated in the colonial retail economy. Over time these sojourners formed social organizations, temples and schools in an effort to maintain a link with their homeland. Over 150 000 Chinese immigrants were arriving each year at the start of the twentieth century, with the total doubling by the 1930s. Men were the first to arrive, but in the 1930s large numbers of female migrants arrived to work in domestic service, the rubber and tin industries and as prostitutes.

So strong was the Chinese role in the economy at independence in 1957 that the government adopted an affirmative action policy for education and employment targeted at native Malays.

By 1990 the Chinese represented over 28 per cent of the country’s total population, or 4.9 million in a population of 18.4 million. But as job opportunities in the oublic sector began to decrease for Chinese residents, greater numbers of skilled workers re-migrated to Australia, the US, Canada and the UK.

A recession in 1985, for example, led to the outflow of 40 000 Malaysians of Chinese heritage over the subsequent five years.

- An excerpt: Spellman, W.M., Uncertain Identity: International Migration Since 1945 (Great Britian, 2008), pg 196