Corporate chiefs from Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese minority made a rare plea for racial fairness Monday, urging the government to ensure its economic policies benefit every ethnic community and not just the majority Malays.
The call by Malaysia’s main ethnic Chinese trade coalition, which represents 28,000 businesses, touches on one of this multiracial country’s most sensitive subjects – affirmative action programs geared at helping the ethnic Malay majority catch up with the more prosperous Chinese by allowing them advantages in education, housing, bank loans, government jobs and contracts.
“We must also allow other races to have opportunities to perform,” said William Cheng, president of The Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry of Malaysia, or ACCCIM.
Minority Chinese and Indians have occasionally called for such policies to be reviewed. But Malay leaders, who hold political power, have repeatedly defended the decades-old privileges as necessary to curb Malay poverty and warned minorities not to question them, insisting that too much public debate could hurt stability.
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“We don’t (oppose) the government helping the poor, but when (the poor can) stand up already, then we must let them freely compete,” Cheng told a news conference.
Many analysts say that the objective of the affirmative action policy has already been met and that the Malays hold a substantial amount of national wealth. The government denies that with both sides providing conflicting statistics to make their case.
Source: Forbes
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