By Mehmet Enes Beşer
China’s rapid emergence on the world scene has been the pride of much of the diasporic Chinese population. Within Malaysia, with its ethnic Chinese constituting around a quarter of the country, China’s emergence as a superpower is invariably welcomed with cultural nostalgia, symbolic gestures of goodwill, and rational interest. But underlying this reality is a more nuanced truth: Chinese Malaysians will readily endorse China’s achievements yet have developed a separate cultural and political identity that substantially diverges from Beijing’s concept of an integrated, civilizational Chinese community.
Such duality has roots in the past. Chinese in Malaysia extend back centuries, but the majority of the Chinese Malaysians in this country today are descended from the 19th century and early 20th century, when immigrants rolled into the country in waves during British rule. The immigrants had dialects, customs, and loyalties to particular places—Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka—but generally speaking, their identities stretched themselves out into the Malaysian form. Compared to mainland Chinese communities, Chinese Malaysians developed in a postcolonial, multicultural nation where religion, language, and ethnicity were politicized and institutionally and nationally politicized.
Chinese Malaysian identity is thus plural and locally constructed. Mandarin may be employed as lingua franca among ethnic Chinese, but dialect still counts, and Chinese Malaysians’ cultural mores still have the flavor of localities—from building types and architecture to politics. The Malaysian independent Chinese-language school system itself is a fine example. The Dong Zong movement and the Chinese independent high school network are an insistence local to the fullest extent on preserving language and cultural heritage—not as identification with China, but as a resistance to linguistic exclusion and assimilation in Malaysia.
This difference is all the more present in political terms. Whereas Beijing promotes the idea of a “Chinese nation” overseas through such initiatives as “United Front work” and foreign policy with overseas Chinese, Chinese Malaysians experience a brutally lived-apart political reality. The majority are members of a multicultural state whose identity is mediated by a system of ethnic policy, electoral politics, and intercommunal bargaining. Their participation in Malaysia’s democratic institutions, forces, and civil society places them in a civic space that is very distant from the Chinese Communist Party’s conception of national citizenship.
Indeed, for most Chinese Malaysians, this pride in China’s ascendance to world prominence is not translated into political or ideological sympathies. Chinese anxieties about authoritarianism, spying, and human rights violations resonate more loudly among sections of society—diaspora youth, urban middle class, and human rights or pro-democracy activists, depending on the case. Yet even now, there are interest-of-the-utility—the interests of trade and investment, tourism, education exchange—that lie behind current patterns of bilateral interaction, especially trade and investment.
This creates a multi-layered identity: ethnically Chinese, nationally Malaysian, cosmopolitan, and selectively involved-with-China. It is not unusual to observe Chinese Malaysians welcoming the economic achievements of China but condemning its domestic politics. It is equally not unusual to observe younger generations accepting Chinese popular culture, mourning Malaysian holidays, and pledging allegiance to liberal democratic values at the same moment. This is a hybridity and a result of the ability of the community to have numerous allegiances but to commit absolutely to no one tale of identity.
China’s growing soft power and active diplomacy in Southeast Asia over the last ten years have spawned opportunity and apprehension. Malaysia’s reception to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Confucius Institutes, and cultural exchange—has been warm but also with fear of political influence, dependence, and sovereignty. Such context will help to entrench among Chinese Malaysians the desire to distance their identity from mainland Chinese, while kinship, language, and shared history persist.
Conclusion
Chinese Malaysians hold a unique position: committed to their heritage, typically respectful of China’s success, but fundamentally dissimilar in identity, politics, and cultural evolution. Theirs is not a story of diaspora integration into a host country’s imagination, but of community resilience within a multicultural country. Both their pride in China’s success and their active involvement with Malaysia’s public space and an acute sense of their own distinctive space in it exist together.
As China reaches outward and outward in the world, an appreciation of this complexity will be necessary—not merely for the foreign policy of Beijing, but for Malaysian integration and the world at large with the diaspora Chinese. Identity is not received complete from a geopolitics state after all—it is forged in the embodiment of place, politics, and diversity.
Cover Graph: Chinese Malaysian girls with traditional Cheongsam during 2015 Chinese New Year, Wikicommons.