DID THE PRESENCE OF THE VERNACULAR CHINESE SCHOOLS CAUSE THE MELAYU TO BECOME MORE MELAYU TO GET OUT OF THEIR STUPOR?

WHAT IF THERE WERE NO VERNACULAR CHINESE SCHOOLS? WOULD THE SITUATION OF THE MELAYU BE WORSE TODAY!?

By Mansor Puteh

Just how have the vernacular Mandarin schools been good for the Melayu activists and not good for the Chinese activists?

And how did the Melayu in Malaysia actually benefit from the existence of the vernacular Mandarin and Tamil schools? Here’s how!

Many Melayu activists say and claim if there are no vernacular Chinese or Tamil schools, the country would be in greater peace.

In theory this may be true. But at whose expense, if not at the expense of the Melayu themselves, much as I do not like to say this.

On the contrary, the presence of the vernacular schools especially the Mandarin ones, have proved to be useful to some Melayu activists who do not have other issues to harp on.

Yet, their own survival and success in whatever they may be doing now could have been severely affected, if not for the presence of such schools.

Ideally, they claim, if there is no vernacular school and there is only one schooling system, there is greater peace and understanding between the three major races in the country.

However, unfortunately, this can happen in not too long a future, i.e. when the Melayu has achieved cohesion and unity with the demise of the old Melayu leaders who have pre-Merdeka or post-13 May, 1969 mentality, when the Melayu have become ‘the true masters of their own land’.

A single schooling system may be useful to promote national unity, if one looks at how the small but still significant Portuguese-Melaka community in Ujong Pasir, Melaka, who do not send their children to the vernacular schools but to the national schools aka Sekolah Melayu.

Yes, this is what they are SEKOLAH MELAYU any way one looks at it.

After all, there is no such a thing as an American school or a national school in America, just English schools where the medium of instruction is in the language.

So how could the presence of the vernacular Mandarin schools in Malaysia have indeed been useful to the Melayu activists – other than being their popular target of scorn and contempt by charging them to be chauvinists?

Are the Chinese activists chauvinists? Maybe they are. How can we say so? They do not mix around with anyone else, other than their own kind, except during political party campaigns.

Do they take part in other national festivities? One has not seen that happen before. Do they allow their children to mix with those from the other races?   

Are the Chinese and Tamil newspapers promoting chauvinism amongst their own kind? They only write about their own kinds in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China and also India, for one. They hardly write about Malaysians who are not like them, too.

Worse, and unbeknownst to the Chinese activists and politicians from both sides, in the government and the opposition, is how the vernacular Chinese schools have been bad for the Chinese themselves, yet their activists and including some in Dong Zhong do not realize this.

Even if they do now, it is too late for them to do much or anything at all. They have been trapped.

Maybe they have finally realized their own folly now after seeing how their community has become more marginalized the more they move to the cities and towns and with the Melayu in the rural areas encroaching into urban territory and enclosing the close-knit Chinese communities in all the cities and towns in the country.

Don’t the Chinese chauvinists realize how many of the Chinese kids who lack education is reduced to working to post illegal stickers everywhere with the uneducated Indians or shall I say, Tamil kids stealing metal covers wherever they can?

And which races dominate criminal activities in the country?

And it is also happening with the shrinking size of the Chinese community which will see them lose more constituencies so that they are not able to win any seat in the near future, especially if the Melayu have finally come to their senses to get rid of PAS to embrace Umno.

The Melayu activists have reaped what the presence of the vernacular Chinese or shall we say vernacular Mandarin schools, so much so that they had managed to turn things around to benefit much or a lot from it, for without it, the status of the economy and also the politics of the Melayu today would have been much worse.

The division of the Melayu into two parts – Umno and PAS and now three parts with the presence of the pseudo-Melayu political party otherwise known as Parti KeAdilan Rakyat (PKR) proves that the Melayu can only lose if there their community is fractured.

All of this, acts to confuse the Chinese activists and politicians into thinking that they stand to gain much from the split amongst the Melayu in the country. But it is just a ploy by the Melayu to further bring out the true colors of the Chinese.

The Chinese do not realize that if the Melayu are united, they would be able to withstand any political onslaught from the Chinese, and they can even make do with MCA and Gerakan who then would have no choice but to merge with DAP, which is a pseudo-Chinese party anyway which uses Mandarin in their conferences and annual meetings instead of the national language compared to PKR which uses Melayu which embraces everybody.

On the other hand if there is only schooling system, with no vernacular Chinese and Indian schools, then surely most of the political as well as government and commercial activities in the country would have been dominated by the Chinese themselves.

So in the end the whole country could be theirs to control, and with such immense power, they can create immense and unthinkable opportunities to further reduce the influence of the Melayu including creating some systems that could ensure that the population of the Melayu be further reduced.

Singapore did it by ensuring the population of the Melayu in the republic remained at fourteen percent like it did when the country became independent from Malaysia in 1963. They had to bring in more Chinese from Indonesia and the other countries to prop up the shrinking local Chinese population knowing how the Chinese normally do not like having large families compared to the Melayu.

If they did not do this, surely, the size of the Melayu population in Singapore would be at least thirty percent by now.

The Zionist state of Israel too had to take drastic measures to ensure that their local Arab population does not overwhelm their Jewish population; and they do it by importing willing East Europeans to come to Israel and be given immediately citizenship in their Law of Return, which do not apply to the Arabs who have lived there for generations, but who had been displaced from their own land with their properties seized.