Opinion | Can China’s ‘community of shared future’ grow amid Malaysia’s internal trust deficit?
- President Xi Jinping’s vision of the advancement of humanity has a testing ground in Malaysia – and a cautionary tale of challenges
- The Southeast Asian nation’s Malay Muslim and Chinese Confucian communities are at odds, but have much common ground to work with
Islam and Confucianism share what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers referred to as the Axial Age moment: an enlightened realisation that humanity is of one family, transcending the ethnocentrism of the times. The Prophet Mohammed envisaged an ummah, or community, of divergent tribes and creeds. Confucius the sage anticipated an order under heaven in which all peoples could coexist in harmony.
First contact between the two civilisations dates back to the 6th century, when Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas, a companion of the Prophet, visited and established diplomatic ties with Emperor Gaozong of the Tang dynasty. During the Ming dynasty, Admiral Zhenghe, a Hui Muslim, stopped over in Malacca, marking the dawn of the Malay-Islamic and Sino-Confucian relationship.
These legacies, together with the Malay majority’s display of “ethnic grace”, laid the foundation of a multiracial, multireligious modern Malaysia – and largely spared the young nation the ethnoreligious strife that marred other postcolonial states’ struggle for nationhood.
The promising start notwithstanding, Malaysia struggled to reconcile the unity-diversity tension. Malaysians began to drift apart, retreating into parallel cultural universes, with little meaningful cross-cultural intersection. The vernacular school system, for example, proved divisive, with Chinese educationalists’ hardline stance seen as an affront to the Malay language and the Malaysian identity.
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Mahathir Mohamad on Malaysia’s politics, US-China relations and the pandemic
The 1971 implementation of the National Economic Policy (NEP) narrowed the wealth gap, but fear of Chinese economic dominance persists. The collapse of the multiracial Pakatan Harapan government earlier this year was precipitated by these underlying anxieties, including the notion that the Malays must fend for themselves.