ARE SUPPORTERS OF THE VERNACULR MANDARIN AND TAMIL SCHOOLS ARE PROOF THAT THEY DO NOT SUPPORT ASSIMILATION;

WITH THE MANDARIN VERNACULAR SCHOOLS LOSING ITS RELEVANCE TO MALAYSIA TODAY AND WITH THEM ALSO NOT MIXING WITH THE MAJORITY MELAYU?

The Constitution allows the study of the mother tongue, other than the national language which is Melayu; but this does not mean that the government has to provide for the Chinese and Tamil communities land and money.

Of course every other country in the world except for a few that do not have too many Chinese and Indians or Tamils that do not have such a clause in their own constitution.

But this does not mean that all the countries would provide for these communities and build special schools for them, by also offering financial allocation every year.

They can establish their own schools but at their own personal expense.

The other reason is because in the other countries the sizes of the Chinese and Tamils communities are not so large so they are not able to use or misuse this factor to put pressure on the governments to use the racial card and abide with their demands; the young Chinese and Tamils simply had to be sent to the local or national schools.

Here in Malaysia the clause in the constitution has been misused and with the sizes of the Chinese and Tamils to be quite substantial and with the divide in the majority Melayu native community, they are able to force or twist the arms of the predominantly Melayu government to accept their demands.

So Malaysia has the national schooling system or Sekolah Melayu or Melayu Schools and also the vernacular Mandarin and Tamil schools.

And why aren’t the Natives of Sabah and Sarawak not making similar demands; most of them choose to send their children to the national schools of Sekolah Melayu.

And for that matter why are they aren’t schools in the other languages or dialects?

The reason being that the sizes of these communities are too small to allow their community leaders to make those demands.

So in the meanwhile as long as the sizes of the Chinese and Tamil communities in Malaysia are large their community leaders can continue to make those demands, despite the fact that there are now some schools in Mandarin and Tamil had to be closed down because they were in areas where the number of Chinese and Tamil students had dwindled considerably so much so that having those schools there would not be tenable anymore.

Many Chinese boys and girls learnt the hard way because their parents had chosen albeit wrongly and misguidedly that sending their children to such schools where the medium of instruction is Mandarin would give them an upper hand and a better quality education in Malaysia compared to those that the could get in the national schools or Sekolah Melayu.

If this is the case then why are those non-Melayu and Sino-Bumiputeras who had studied in such school not doing well in life? Where are the success stories?

At the most the few non-Chinese who had studied in the Mandarin schools can do or have is the command of Mandarin, a language that they can still find no real benefits in the real world. None or so few of them had gone on to pursue their education in Taiwan or China.

So the leaders or officials of Dong Zhong must be sleeping and thinking that Malaysia today is like Malaysia in the early 1950s or 1960s.

How often do their leaders or officials of this organization mix with the majority Melayu and take part in social and cultural activities and intellectual discourses in public and in the national language or even in English?

There is one official of a Chinese cultural organization who claims to have degrees from universities in America, yet, who has not stepped foot in the country and his English is deplorable or non-existent so much so that no one has ever heard him speak in the language; yet he was said to have written his theses in this particular language.

Unfortunately, the university where he had got his degrees from are those that exist only in the internet or cyberspace.

And the fact that they hardly ever mix with the majority Melayu and are involved in the everyday affairs of the society and country is ample proof that those Chinese especially who have Mandarin school backgrounds are living in their enclosed environment which is slowly but surely being encroached by the Melayu and soon they would be displaced even in the commerce sector.

The Chinese especially and also Tamil who studied in the vernacular Mandarin or Tamil schools have a different kind of look in their faces; and they find it difficult to mix with the majority Melayu later on in life.

And they are totally different in many ways compared to the Chinese and Tamils who studied in the Sekolah Melayu.

So it won’t be wrong to make a rough guess as to why those Chinese and Indians who like to criticize the government or to take petty matters and issues to the streets and in their blogs or FBs comprise mostly of such people with vernacular school backgrounds.

They can be distinguished by the way they write in Melayu or English and their logic and common sense that do not make sense.

It is not wrong for them to feel that the country is not serving them well since they do not feel belonged in it.

Is there a similar organization like Dong Zong or Dong Zhaozhong in Singapore or the other countries in Southeast Asia or America or Australia and the United Kingdom, one that says they aim to uphold the study of Mandarin for the Chinese students in these countries which can also become a pressure group to force the government in the respective countries to obey them or their political parties would not get the support from the local Chinese communities?

No. And there can never be such organizations in these countries except in Malaysia. The reasons for them to exist only in Malaysia are obvious in that the Melayu majority are fractured and divided into the different political camps so they are easily manipulated and in order to pander to the dictates of the Chinese community they have to surrender some of their rights and suffer indignities as well.