This episode completes the historical narrative for another Southeast Asian nation. Here we see Malaysia from 1970 to 2021. In fact, one of the events covered, the 1MDB scandal, blew up after I started recording this podcast in 2016. Although Malaysia is not as rich as Singapore or Brunei, it comes in a respectable third place, and here you will learn how they did it.
https://blubrry.com/hoseasia/72752382/episode-105-malaysia-another-success-story/
(Transcript)
Hello, this is your friendly neighborhood podcast host, and what a turnout for donations to the podcast at the beginning of the year! Since the last episode went up on New Year’s Day, there has been not one, not two, not three . . . oh, did you think I was going to stop at four? No, not four, but FIVE donations to the podcast, from Russell I., Ben G., Caroline L., Lindy S., and Brian E. Russell and Ben got honorable mentions for making donations last year, so that means they now get the Water Buffalo icon next to their names on the Podcast Hall of Fame page! Russell and Ben, it’s good to hear from you again, and I also enjoyed the emails Russell sent me, telling about his trip to the Philippines. As for Brian, he met my challenge; he is the first to donate for three years in a row, so I have made a new icon to commemorate that. This icon features the most famous attraction in Myanmar, the 328-foot-tall golden Shwedagon Pagoda! If you don’t remember the details on that pagoda, I believe I talked about it in Episode 24. Brian, I hope you like the new icon next to your name.
Now before I forget, this episode is dedicated to all five of you. Here in Kentucky I am currently snowed in, so if you’re in a place that gets winter, may your winter be a mild one. May all of you enjoy success at the next endeavors you set your minds to, and may this be the start of a lucky trend that sees you through the whole year.
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Episode 105: Malaysia, Another Success Story
Greetings, dear listeners, from the hills of Bluegrass country in Kentucky! Well, I’m not going to say that 2021 is as bad as 2020 was, but it certainly got off to a turbulent start, didn’t it? Let’s hope that when 2020 went out the door, it did not put on a wig and come back, disguised as 2021. Of course, you must have heard about the unpleasant transition between presidencies in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, the Internet connection was out in my house for a whole weekend, and after that a minor cold further delayed me getting started on recording this episode. And on top of all that, my 62nd birthday came and went in the middle of the other events. Therefore I can say it has been a busy fortnight.
Before we begin today’s topic, I need to correct an error from the previous episode. This is a reminder that the podcast is a learning experience for me as well as for you! Last time I stated that the current president of Singapore is Tony Tan. Well, not anymore. My source on that is obviously out of date. Although Mr. Tan is alive as I record this, his term in office ended in 2017, and he was not allowed to run again, due to a constitutional amendment passed in 2016, that reserves the presidency of Singapore to Malay candidates. Sometime in the past I mentioned that the population of Singapore is three-quarters Chinese, and it was a major reason why Singapore could not remain part of Malaysia; like I said, the Malay majority on the mainland fears drowning in a sea of Chinese. It looks like this amendment is an effort to be fair to Singapore’s minority groups, what we call “affirmative action” in the United States. Anyway, Mr. Tan’s successor is Halimah Yacob. She is the first woman president in Singapore’s history, and the second Moslem president (the first was Yusof Ishak, in 1965). All right, enough with Singapore. The previous episode covered Singapore’s history all the way to the present, and now I want to try doing the same thing with Malaysia. This could be a challenge, since in terms of land area, Singapore is the smallest country in Southeast Asia. Countries with more land and more people naturally generate more events worth talking about.
The last time the podcast featured Malaysia, we got as far as the year 1970. If you want to refresh your memory on what happened there in the quarter-century between World War II and 1970, the episodes you need to listen to are Episodes 69 and 98. And if you haven’t listened to those episodes before, now is the time to listen to them, in order to keep track of what is happening in this episode.
Here is a quick recap. The colonial power in this area was Great Britain, and before the war they had managed the Malay peninsula well. For that reason, the Malays did not develop a nationalist movement before World War II. Long-time listeners will remember that the Philippines produced a nationalist movement in the late nineteenth century, and nationalist movements appeared in Burma, Indonesia and Vietnam shortly after the twentieth century began. When the Malays got a nationalist movement, it was a partly a reaction to the communist guerrillas that got organized during the war, among the Chinese community living in the Malay peninsula. The communists had first fought the Japanese, and now they launched a revolt when the British returned, much like the revolt the communists in Vietnam were fighting against the French at the same time. Unlike the French, the British succeeded in getting most of the native population to cooperate with them, and thus were able to put down the uprising, which they called the “Malayan Emergency.” Meanwhile, the Malays formed a political party, which they called the UMNO, the United Malays National Organization. After the 1950s began, the Chinese and Indian communities on the Malay peninsula started political parties of their own, and they formed a coalition with the UMNO, known as the Alliance. The Alliance won the first election held, in 1955, and it put forward a plan for how its members would work together after independence; the British gave their blessing to this, and granted independence to Malaya on August 31, 1957. The leader of the UMNO, Prince Tengku Abdul Rahman, became Malaya’s first prime minister.
But that’s not the end to the independence story, because the British had three more colonies nearby: Singapore, Sarawak, and Sabah, also called North Borneo. There was also the mini-sultanate of Brunei, which was officially a British protectorate. Although Brunei had its own government, Britain controlled its defense and foreign policy, so it might as well have been another colony. Reasoning that these territories could not stand on their own if they were turned loose, Tengku proposed that they be given to Malaya, which, with its resources of tin and rubber, and a carefully worked out government, had a fighting chance of survival. Britain agreed, but the sultan of Brunei said no to this transfer, so Brunei stayed with Britain for twenty more years; we will come back to Brunei in a future episode. The other territories were handed over in 1963. Since this nearly doubled the size of the Malay state, it was given a new name; we no longer call it Malaya, but Malaysia.
During his time as prime minister, Tengku Abdul Rahman saw the end of the “Malayan Emergency,” the transformation of Malaya into Malaysia, the stormy union with Singapore that ended with Singapore’s expulsion, a territorial dispute with the Philippines over Sabah, the brush war with Indonesia that we call the Konfrontasi, and the creation of ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, in which Malaysia is one of the five original members.
We saw in Episode 69 that the plan for independence was to have the country’s ethnic Malays control the government, while the Chinese, and to a lesser extent the Indians, controlled the economy. You can say that plan worked too well. By the end of the 1960s, impoverished Malays resented the economic success of the Chinese, while the Chinese resented the political privileges granted to Malays. In the 1969 general election, the Alliance lost its two-thirds majority in parliament, and when two opposition parties, the Democratic Action Party and the Gerakan, or People’s Movement, held a parade to celebrate in Kuala Lumpur, it led to a full-scale riot; Malay gangs looted Chinese businesses, killing hundreds of Chinese in the process.
Tengku retired in 1970, and Tun Abdul Razak took his place. That is where our narrative broke off on Malaysia, at the end of Episode 98. Since present-day Malaysia regards Tengku as the country’s founding father, you would think the government would hold onto his house in Kuala Lumpur, and maybe turn it into a museum, but in an interesting twist, the government of the Philippines acquired the house in 1987, and now it is part of the Philippine Embassy in Malaysia.
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The new prime minister, Tun Abdul Razak, enlarged the Alliance in 1973 by inviting some opposition parties to join, and he called the new coalition Barisan Nasional, or the National Front. The National Front won the next two elections decisively, in 1974 and 1978. Ethnicity, however, still dominated the political scene, and two major opposition parties remained, the previously mentioned Democratic Action Party and the Pan-Malayan Islamic Party.
To end the problem of ethnic unrest, the government decided that the Malay community needed to achieve economic parity. In other words, the Malays needed to be as rich as the Chinese. Therefore in 1971 the government introduced a socio-economic affirmative action plan, which it called MNEP, the Malaysian New Economic Policy. The goal of MNEP was to put 30% of Malaysia’s corporate wealth in the hands of the Malays and the forest tribes within 20 years. To do this it carried out a massive campaign of discrimination in favor of the Malays, which handed key jobs in the army, police, civil service and government to Malays. Similar rules were applied to education, scholarships, share deals, corporate management and even the right to import a car.
By 1990, the target year, the Malay share of corporate wealth had risen to 19%; it still had a long way to go to reach the 30% target. Poverty did fall dramatically, though. A new Malay middle class appeared, and nationalist violence by Malay extremists receded. Unfortunately, the MNEP policy led to cronyism, and discrimination against Indians and Chinese has increased. Finally, it is now half a century since MNEP was introduced, and while the forest tribes – the Orang Asli of the peninsula and smaller tribes in Sarawak and Sabah – are supposed to benefit from these policies, these groups lag far behind peninsular Malays when it comes to poverty, employment, education and health care.
Both prime ministers in the 1970s were sickly individuals. Tun Abdul Razak died from leukemia in January 1976, while seeking medical treatment in London. He was succeeded by his brother-in-law, Datuk Hussein Onn. Hussein got along well with the Chinese and Indian parties in the National Front, despite ongoing racial tensions; for that, he is now fondly called Bapa Perpaduan, or the Father of Unity. In early 1981 he underwent coronary bypass surgery; that prompted him to step down, and his deputy, Mahathir bin Muhammad, took over.
The 1970s also saw a resurgence of the communist uprising we covered in Episode 69. The Malayan Communist Party broke into three factions in 1970, and while the two new factions did not last long, the party’s core faction declared that 1975 would be, quote, "a new year in combat." Unquote. It looks like they launched the new offensive in response to Malaysia’s establishment of diplomatic relations with Communist China in June 1974; they were letting the world know that the end of China’s isolation from the non-communist world would not stop their own struggle. However, the situation for the communists had not improved since we last heard from them. Whereas there had been 8,000 communists in the 1950s, Malaysian government sources and the CIA estimated that in 1976, there were just 2,400 communist insurgents on the Malay peninsula, and most of them were near the border of Thailand. Another 1,000 were in the Borneo state of Sarawak, belonging to a separate organization called the North Kalimantan Communist Party. Therefore the Malaysian government did not feel the need to declare a “state of emergency” as the British had done. Instead, it introduced a series of programs designed to improve the economy and get the people involved in maintaining security, like the Security and Development Program, or KESBAN, Rukun Tetangga, or Neighbourhood Watch, and the People’s Volunteer Group. The ultimate goal of these programs was to get the people to look to the government, rather than the rebels, for a better future. Not only did the programs work, the communists could see that they were fighting a losing battle, because Malaysia was prospering on the world stage, and communism collapsed in the Soviet Union and its satellite states at the end of the 1980s. Mahathir urged them to lay down their arms and join the other Malaysians in developing the country. After a series of negotiations between the Malaysian Government and the Malayan Communist Party, with the Thais acting as mediators, the two sides signed a peace accord in Hat Yai, Thailand on December 2, 1989; here the communists finally agreed to lay down their arms. A similar peace agreement was reached with the communists in Sarawak on October 17, 1990.
Podcast footnote: In the first week of 2021, a news story came out of Malaysia about the owner of two restaurants getting in trouble with the authorities, because he decorated the restaurants with a Chinese communist theme, putting in wallpaper and posters that featured scenes from the Cultural Revolution, and a picture of Mao Zedong. Just who thinks this is a good idea? A few years ago, I heard about a communist-themed restaurant in Monterey Park, California, called Private Party Restaurant, where the waiters wore Red Guard army uniforms, complete with red armbands and caps with red stars on them. I don’t know if that restaurant is still in business, as I record this episode. End footnote.
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So far, Mahathir bin Muhammad has been the longest-lasting prime minister of Malaysia; he held the job twice, for a total of twenty-four years. His predecessors had been in charge when South Vietnam fell to communism, and from them Mahathir inherited the problem of tens of thousands of refugees, sailing to Malaysia from Vietnam. Most of these “boat people” were ethnic Chinese, and since Vietnam stopped getting along with China when the Second Indochina War ended, these people weren’t welcome in Vietnam anymore. Still concerned about the Chinese replacing the Malays as the largest ethnic group in Malaysia, the Malay government did not want these refugees either, and threatened to shoot them on sight. Most of them ended up being held on small offshore islands until other nations agreed to take them in. In April 1989 the government stopped accepting Indochinese refugees, period.
Under the Mahathir administration, Malaysia’s economy went into overdrive, growing from one based on two commodities, tin and rubber, to one firmly rooted in industry and manufacturing. Government monopolies were privatized, and heavy industries were encouraged. Among the heavy industries, steel manufacturing failed, while Malaysian autos were successful but heavily protected; presently the two most successful Malaysian car companies are Perodua and Proton. In addition, multinational companies were persuaded to invest in Malaysia, to promote trade, drilling for oil, tourism, computers, electronics, and science. And that’s not all; Mahathir also gave the country some outstanding landmarks, through several mega-building projects. The most famous project raised the Petronas Twin Towers. From 1996 to 2004, the Petronas Towers were the tallest buildings in the world, until the Taipei 101 and the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai surpassed them, and today they are still the tallest buildings in Southeast Asia. Other projects built Kuala Lumpur International Airport, the North-South Expressway, the Sepang International Circuit, the Multimedia Super Corridor, the Bakun hydroelectric dam, International Islamic University Malaysia, and Putrajaya, a new city for the executive and judicial branches of the federal government.
The downside of Mahathir’s time as prime minister was that the main media outlets became little more than government mouthpieces, because like some other Southeast Asian leaders we have met, Mahathir believed that the only democracy that would work in Malaysia is a controlled democracy, with a strong leader in charge. A 1983 constitutional conflict between him and the hereditary sultans led to a compromise that largely took away from the sultans their right to veto legislation. What’s more, the once proudly independent courts appeared to become subservient to government wishes. Mahathir also permitted widespread use of the Internal Security Act (ISA) to silence opposition leaders and social activists, most famously in 1987’s Operation Lalang, when 106 people were arrested and the publishing licences of four newspapers were revoked.
To balance all this, I will give you a quote from the memoirs of a former Law Minister, Zaid Ibrahim. Quote: "In my heart, I cannot accept allegations that Dr Mahathir personally was a corrupt man. Corrupt people are never brave enough to speak as loudly as Dr Mahathir. Wealth is not a major motivation for him. He only craves power." End quote.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Malaysian economy grew at an average rate of 8 percent a year. The only interruption to that growth came with the 1997 Asian currency crisis, and the recession that followed. Mahathir blamed it all on unscrupulous Western speculators like George Soros, who had undermined the economies of the developing world for their personal gain. Mahathir pegged the Malaysian ringgit to the US dollar, bailed out what were seen as crony companies, forced banks to merge, and made it difficult for foreign investors to remove their money from Malaysia’s stock exchange. As a result, Malaysia recovered from the economic crisis more rapidly than other Southeast Asian nations, and that further bolstered Mahathir’s prestige.
During the currency crisis, Mahathir had a falling out with the deputy prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim. In addition to being deputy prime minister, Anwar was also finance minister and president of International Islamic University Malaysia, and everyone knew he was being groomed to become the next prime minster. In early 1997, Mahathir even appointed Anwar as acting Prime Minister, while he took a two-month vacation. But then the currency crisis struck; Mahathir and Anwar argued over who was responsible for the crisis, and what to do about it. The UMNO Party held its quadrennial general assembly in 1998, which is Malaysia’s version of what we call a presidential convention in the United States, and there a book entitled 50 Reasons Why Anwar Cannot Become Prime Minister was circulated; it accused Anwar of homosexuality and corruption. The police were instructed to investigate the claims; Anwar was dismissed, arrested, convicted of corruption and sexual misconduct, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Opponents of the regime responded by merging two older political parties to found a new party, the People’s Justice Party, led by Anwar’s wife, Dr. Wan Azizah Wan Ismail. At the next election, in 1999, the People’s Justice Party only won five seats in Parliament, but it has done better since then, and it remains an important faction in Malaysian politics to this day.
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Mahathir bin Muhammad’s term as prime minister ended on an unexpectedly bad note. Two weeks before he stepped down, in 2003, he hosted a summit for the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Putrajaya, and said this. Quote:
"We [Muslims] are actually very strong, 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million [during the Holocaust]. But today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries. And they, this tiny community, have become a world power." End quote.
He went on to call Israel "the enemy allied with most powerful nations." This was shocking because Southeast Asia is not a place known for anti-Semitism. Longtime listeners will remember from Episode 44, for instance, that around 1,200 German and Austrian Jews escaped the Holocaust by going to the Philippines, and there even Japanese soldiers left them alone. Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, local Moslems had not given Israel or the Jews much attention, because their presence in Southeast Asia was insignificant; there have never been more than a few thousand Jews in the entire region. Predictably, Israel and Western nations called Mahathir’s speech "gravely offensive," while Moslem leaders and politicians defended it.
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Mahathir’s hand-picked successor, Abdullah Badawi, was widely respected. Five months after taking over, in March 2004, elections were held, and he led the National Front to a landslide victory. Although he smashed the opposition parties, he also freed Anwar Ibrahim, leading to hopes that future prime ministers would be less authoritarian. Whereas Mahathir is feisty, Abdullah is pious and mild-mannered, taking a non-confrontational, consensus-seeking approach to all issues. He set up a royal commission to investigate corruption in the police force, and he promised no more grandiose projects, thereby scrapping plans for a new bridge between Malaysia and Singapore, to replace the existing Johor-Singapore Causeway.
The National Front was used to ruling with a two-thirds majority in parliament. Although it won the next election, in 2008, it lost the two-thirds majority, and opposition parties gained control over five of Malaysia’s 13 states, including two that were critical to the economy, Selangor and Penang. This persuaded Abdullah to step down in the following year. As you probably expected, he was succeeded by his deputy, Najib Abdul Razak. Najib was the closest thing to a political blueblood that the country could have; he was the son of the second prime minister, Tun Abdul Razak, and nephew of the third, Hussein Onn. He had been groomed for this role ever since he first entered national politics in 1976, at the age of 23, to fill his father’s seat in parliament.
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Najib devoted his administration to economic reforms, such as cuts to government subsidies, a loosening of restrictions on foreign investment, and reductions in preferential treatment of ethnic Malays in business. The cuts to the subsidies caused the cost of living to soar and made Najib unpopular, while unstable oil prices and the fallout from the 1MDB scandal, which I will cover in a minute, led to a depreciation of the Malaysian currency, the ringgit.
Before the 2013 election, it was pointed out that Malaysia’s electoral system was inherently unfair, with unbalanced constituency sizes in different districts, a lack of access to the media for opposition parties, and possible gerrymandering. When the votes were counted, the results were similar to those of the 2008 election; the National Front lost seven seats in parliament but retained its majority, so Najib stayed as prime minister. Najib blamed the losses on what he called a “Chinese tsunami” of voters, and three days later, it was reported that 120,000 people gathered at a stadium outside of Kuala Lumpur’s city limits, to protest the election results. Anwar Ibrahim had led the opposition in the election, so later in the same year, he was charged with sodomy for a second time and sent to prison again.
Two news events during Najib’s next term put Malaysia in the world spotlight. The first was the loss of two airliners. On March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, also known as MH370, took off from Kuala Lumpur to go to Beijing with 227 passengers and a flight crew of 12. To go from Malaysia to China, an airplane has to fly due north, but once this flight got over the South China Sea, it turned west, flew over the Malay peninsula and the Andaman Sea – and then just disappeared. Presumably it crashed somewhere in the South Indian Ocean, after it flew out of reach of radar. Over the next few years, a few pieces of wreckage washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean that could be from the plane, but the crash site was never located. Moreover, we don’t know if the plane was intentionally steered off course, meaning we can’t tell if this tragedy was an accident – or an incident. Another airliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, was lost on July 17, 2014, but in this case we know what happened; the Russians shot it down with a surface-to-air missile, when it passed over the part of eastern Ukraine that is a war zone between Ukraine and Russia.
The other event was the assassination of a member of North Korea’s ruling family in Malaysia. Kim Jong-Nam, the eldest son of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, disqualified himself as a possible successor, when he tried to visit Tokyo Disneyland in 2001, using a fake passport. When you’re a supervillain-in-training, it’s okay to be cultured; you may remember the scene from the Star Wars movie Revenge of the Sith, where Palpatine attended an alien water ballet. But you can’t let others know you like Mickey Mouse! Kim Jong-Il banished him to China, and made his youngest son, Kim Jong-Un, his heir. After that Kim Jong-Nam lived a playboy lifestyle, with two wives, a mistress and three children. He traveled from country to country to keep ahead of any North Korean agents. That worked until February 2017, when two prostitutes walked up behind him in Kuala Lumpur airport and wiped a lethal dose of VX nerve poison on his face. And that’s not the strangest part of the story; the women, one Indonesian and the other Vietnamese, swore they had no idea they were committing an assassination, and actually thought that they were taking part in some kind of YouTube prank show! Murder charges against them were dismissed in 2019. The Indonesian woman was released immediately; the Vietnamese woman pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of "voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means," and was sentenced to three years in prison, but ended up only serving one month before she was released as well.
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Now back to the prime minister. If you think Najib may have been hiding something, you’re right, and it came out in the open in 2015. The minister of finance owned an investment fund called 1MDB, which is short for 1Malaysia Development Berhad. This fund had been established in 2008, for the purpose of turning Kuala Lumpur into a global financial center. However, over the next few years the fund racked up huge debts, possibly reaching as high as $12 billion US dollars, and foreign agencies like Standard & Poor downgraded the bonds issued by 1MDB to junk status. Allegations were made in several newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, that part of the debt came from the transfer of millions from the fund to the accounts of the prime minister and people close to him like Jho Low, his financier. Najib responded with a number of controversial acts, to tighten his grip on power. He replaced the deputy prime minister, closed two newspapers, passed a value-added tax called the Goods and Services Tax, and pushed through parliament a controversial National Security Council Bill, that provided the prime minister with unprecedented powers. The new powers were used to purge critics from his ruling party.
Najib’s denials of any wrongdoing were met by scepticism from the public, who started calling him “The Man of Steal”; here steal is spelled S-T-E-A-L. The prime minister and his government got what was coming to them in the 2018 election. For the first time, the National Front went down in defeat, at the hands of one of its former members – surprise! – former Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad. Calling for Najib to resign, Mahathir had left the UMNO Party in 2016, formed his own party, joined an opposition coalition called Pakatan Harapan, and ran as its candidate for prime minister, with Wan Azizah, the wife of his former political enemy Anwar, as the deputy prime minister candidate. This is probably the most remarkable comeback in Southeast Asian history, and at 92 years old, Mahathir became the oldest leader of any nation in today’s world. Wan Azizah in turn became Malaysia’s first female deputy prime minister.
Two months after the 2018 election, Najib was arrested by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, which was investigating how 42 million ringgits, or US$10.6 million, went from a company named SRC International, to Najib’s bank account. Soon Najib was charged with abuse of power, multiple counts of criminal breach of trust and money laundering, and tampering with the 1MDB audit report. He stood trial, and on July 28, 2020, the High Court convicted Najib on all seven counts of corruption, and sentenced him to twelve years in prison and a fine of 210 million ringgits (that’s $49.3 million in US dollars). The missing money was traced to luxury real estate, a private jet, Van Gogh and Monet artworks – and even a Hollywood movie, The Wolf of Wall Street. A few days before the conviction, the US bank Goldman Sachs reached a $3.9 billion settlement with the Malaysian government for its role in the enormous corruption scheme. According to the most recent sources I could find, Najib has not gone to jail; he appealed the initial verdict, as you might expect, and he has to stand in four more trials, for charges he has not yet been tried for. This process could go on for years.
As for Mahathir, his second term as prime minister was much shorter than the first. As promised, he pardoned Anwar Ibrahim, the Goods and Services Tax was done away with, and he launched investigations into the 1MDB scandal. But in February 2020 he resigned, because a new ruling coalition was formed that included the UMNO Party, and Mahathir did not want anything to do with them anymore. As I record this, Mahathir is 95 years old, but I won’t declare him retired permanently; he fooled us once before! He was succeeded by the Minister of Home Affairs, Muhyiddin bin Haji Muhammad Yassin, who comes from the Malaysian United Indigenous Party, and is going by the title of acting prime minister until the next election can be held.
One way you can measure how well nations are doing nowadays is by measuring the average income of their citizens, what we call the per capita income. If you do it with Southeast Asia, Singapore comes out as the richest nation, because of all the commerce and industry it handles, and Brunei wins the Number Two spot, because it shares a lot of oil money among a small population. Because of the diversification mentioned earlier, Malaysia comes in a healthy third place for the region. According to the International Monetary Fund, Malaysia’s per capita income as of 2020 is $10,192, better than average by Third World standards. The Mahathir administration called its ultimate goal "Vision 2020," meaning that it wanted Malaysia to become a First World nation by 2020. Of course, the date for reaching the goal will have to be pushed back, due to all the unpleasantness we experienced in 2020. And with Malaysia’s government recovering from a huge scandal, it is too early to say when the country will acquire a First World political system – meaning multi-party democracy, a free press, an independent judiciary and the restoration of civil and political liberties – to go with a First World economy. If it can pull that off and keep ethnic tensions to a minimum, it will definitely remain one of Southeast Asia’s happiest places.
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All right, we did it! I said we were going to try to finish the Malaysian part of our narrative in this episode, and we succeeded in making it all the way to the present. In fact, with the 1MDB scandal, most of the events occurred after I launched this podcast. Since the previous episode finished up on Singapore, we now have two countries down, nine more to go. But I think it will take more than one episode to finish the next country we visit. Next time I plan to return to Indochina, to look at what has been happening in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos since 1975. Boy, a lot has been going on there, starting with a Third Indochina War involving Vietnam, Cambodia and China. And in the case of Cambodia, I haven’t told the most horrifying story yet. Join me to hear what happens in Indochina after the Americans leave and the Vietnam War ends – if you dare!
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<Outro>
The Xenohistorian Weblog 