Malaysia’s outdated Look East policy ignores the elephant in the room: China

M Santhananaban

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has now completed three years in office – an unattainable feat for three of his immediate predecessors.

Upon completing his third year in office, Anwar would have a fairly good perspective of the success, as well as disturbing aspects of his predecessors’ administrations. Did they enhance the prospects for national unity, upward mobility, Malaysia’s robustness, resilience and wellbeing?

Corruption concerns

Of Anwar’s predecessors, one managed to obtain land worth RM76m from the government upon retirement, another is under investigation for corruption involving RM170m in cash, whilst a third will be long remembered for the widespread appearance of withering white flags to denote deprivation during his Covid-era ‘emergency’.

Then there was of course the medical doctor, from the University of Malaya’s then campus in Singapore, who held the prime minister’s post for over a third of the country’s independent existence. He introduced the greatest changes, challenges and controversies in the country’s history.

Anwar successfully created some hot news over the fabled family assets of at least one of his predecessors, the subject of some interest and intrigue.

He has also engineered the most extensive publicity campaign for his anti-corruption efforts. He is perhaps the first prime minister to give such importance to these pronouncements.

These, however, would have had a more positive resonance if the discharges not amounting to acquittal involving high-profile politicians were rarer and related to relatively unknown people.

Power of the PM’s office

Any Malaysian prime minister, on assuming office, becomes the most powerful and, quite quickly, the most profiled person in the country. The king acts on the advice of the prime minister.

Such power is further manifested in the complete or nominal control of the public service with about 1.6 million employees.

The PM also exercises subtle but supreme power over almost half a million employees in government-linked companies. Through this, the government enjoys control of over 40% of overall listed market equity.

Through the public service, the prime minister has not just formal or titular but effective control over senior appointments, enforcement, regulatory and oversight mechanisms. He can also exercise options that can impinge on the thrust of impartiality, impact and profile of any government decision.

Malaysia’s political hierarchy and public sector seem to have finessed loyalty and blind obedience to their superiors to a controversial point.

A culture of fawning, fear and flattery has become ingrained. This has created an environment that has enabled forgeries, fraud and flip-flops.

Review ‘Look East’ policy

Some government policies that have been in place since the 1970s need to be reviewed.

The country has become more developed, urbanised and sophisticated. More people have become aware of their rights, responsibilities and priorities.

Social media is often abuzz with discontent about various issues. These range from lopsided trade arrangements with the US, government gaffes, corruption, traffic congestion at toll gates to the mediocrity and indiscipline in our schools.

In December 1981, the then new Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad suggested we should look East to improve our procedures, productivity and overall prospects.

The compliant media and the complaisant civil service did the rest. They created greater awareness of this suggestion and facilitated the administrative apparatus to propel this Look East fiction to great heights.

After Hussein Onn’s era, civil servants who fawned, flattered and followed instructions to a fault were handpicked and handsomely rewarded to manage certain dubious projects. Most of these projects failed eventually, but they were kept on life-support or completed at inflated costs.

All these civil servants had no skin in the game and their perks remained intact. Failures were often camouflaged to maintain the facade that all was progressing smoothly.

But our overall progress was distressingly slow when we look at where we started with South Korea. In 1980, the per capita incomes of Malaysia and South Korea were equal at about $1,770. But today, Malaysia’s per capita income is about a third of Korea’s. Korea joined the OECD in 1996, about 15 years after attaining per capita parity with Malaysia.

We are still very much a developing country with growing income inequality.

East Asian example

The country now knows what happened to Perwaja Steel, Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ), the poorly managed car project (which has been revived with foreign management and money), Malaysia Airlines and the crooked bridge to Singapore.

A new residence for the prime minister was built in the 1980s. Quite hastily in the 1990s, a new administrative centre was planned and built with another humongous prime minister’s official residence, now largely under-utilised. A new deputy prime minister’s residence was also built in Putrajaya.

We had forgotten that Tunku Abdul Rahman, Tun Abdul Razak and Tun Hussein Onn, in spite of their aristocratic background had operated out of more modest residences.

After 45 years of looking East, we have simply failed to learn anything new from Japan and South Korea on notions of public accountability, responsibility, transparency and shame.

Humiliation, shame, loss of face, repentance and resignation to a lesser lifestyle are an integral part of Chinese, Japanese and Korean leadership culture. They react this way upon being discovered – not necessarily convicted – for corruption and misconduct.

But here, we don’t seem to have compunctions about widespread corruption, excess and extremism.

Both Japan and Korea have institutional accommodation for their leaders with ample private living areas. The larger, ceremonial and public parts of these facilities are maintained in a strictly regulated way at public expense. Any infringement of these norms or departure from set rules gets much attention, scrutiny and searing chastisement.

One good recent example was the case of Korea’s 13th president Yoon Suk-yeol, an erstwhile prosecutor general of his country. On becoming president, he decided that he would move out of the Blue House or Cheong Wa Dae to be ‘nearer the people’.

So he moved into a restricted hilly area, which had institutional quarters for the foreign minister and service chiefs.

When he declared martial law on 3 December 2024, he was hounded out of presidential office to face arrest, humiliation and possible imprisonment.

Since 1981, four South Korean presidents have been imprisoned after proper trials. Chun Do-Hwan, Roh Tae-woo, Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye have done stints in prison. Roh Moo-hyun committed suicide and the present president’s predecessor, Yoon Suk-yeol, is fighting a legal battle to stay out of prison.

In Malaysia, in these four decades, one prime minister was convicted and jailed, and a successor of his speaks of difficult prison conditions. We simply do not have the same regard for our judiciary to uphold some of its decisions. Chief justices of our country have been dismissed arbitrarily and shortchanged.

Malaysia’s executive branch is led by the prime minister in a purist and unalloyed prime minister-centric system. This system overemphasises feudal respect, fawning and flawed obedience over integrity, intellectual prowess, courage and competence.

Let us abandon the lustreless Look East policy and instead concentrate on our old values of inclusiveness, integrity, intellectual honesty and goodwill to all people. We are a multicultural, multilingual and multi-religious society unlike the largely homogeneous East Asian nations.

We should seek to build a public service culture like that of the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese, where every minister is provided with an identical set of office furniture, quality of space, an identical car and a uniform set of staff and other provisions.

Let us not build any more humongous houses for serving or retiring prime ministers but maintain those that have been built with proper care, economy, maintenance and safety.

And no prime minister should be required to come out with a slogan to describe his or her administration. Prime ministers are elected by the people to serve the people. They are not hereditary emperors whose reigns have to be identified with a particular label.

We must be always grateful for the peace that prevails in multi-ethnic Malaysia. When a two-term national leader speaks of a Malay country, it is divisive.

The country is a peaceful one, historically bound by strong mutual respect between the different communities. Sabah and Sarawak retain vestiges of that tradition.

But political dinosaurs are talking of being owners of the land. They seem not to have accepted that the land was slowly subsumed, to be celebrated in an enlarged Malaysia in September 1963. Singapore’s separation in August 1965 did not diminish that Malaysian reality.

We don’t seem to plan for a second or third tier of leaders. Instead, some of the political elite still believe that succession is best served with a son, daughter or in-law.

The overly centralised executive seems incapable of recognising the independence and integrity of Parliament, the judiciary, the various public institutions and the free media.

We can be described as a prime minister-centric system with kitchen cabinets, kindred cliques and coteries of obsequious political and bureaucratic officials exercising undue authority and influence.

It is time to move away from this system, which sidelines the people’s interests, institutions and overarching national interests.

China’s meteoric rise

In East Asia, the constellation of Japan and Korea has been eclipsed by China.

We look like dinosaurs parroting the Look East mantra when we completely ignore China.

China is undoubtedly the world’s most dynamic colossus. Look at its socioeconomic development and poverty eradication efforts. Consider its manufacturing capacity, modern infrastructure and stability.

China has become a superpower. This did not happen overnight. It has been a steady advance since Deng Xiaoping launched his Four Modernisations programme in 1978.

If we fail to recognise this resurgent China, we are very likely caught in a time warp with Western Cold War-era blinkers.

What Anwar can do

As Anwar embarks on his fourth year in his five-year term, he ought to seriously consider whether to continue with the Look East policy.

Ending this restrictive policy would signal a clean break from a confused past of policy errors and missteps.

We must instead reaffirm our commitment to national unity in a multicultural society. Inclusiveness, equality, integrity and a reduction of inequality should guide our way forward.

Let’s hope Anwar does the right thing and steers Malaysia to greater heights of harmony and progress by forging closer relations with our Asean neighbours..

Dato’ M Santhananaban is former Malaysian ambassador with 45 years of public sector experience.

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