First world status: We’ve lost the race
Yeow Boon Kiat | Dec 16, 08 5:13pm
I left the country to further my studies in Taiwan in September 2003. During my five years of pre-university and undergraduate degree studies there, I was back home in Kuala Lumpur three times. After graduation, I was home for two months before starting my teaching career in Singapore.
Every time I travelled back home to KL from Taipei or Singapore, I was usually inundated with nostalgia but after a few days or weeks of my short stay, I will be inevitably struck by a strong desire to leave my darling KL and continue to build my career in foreign countries that practice meritocracy.
These two strong contrasting feelings – can’t wait to fall in love with KL again and can’t wait to say goodbye – have never failed to occur.
Whenever I am home, I just can’t stop comparing KL with Taipei or Singapore or other Asian cities. I think we have repetitively talked and argued about the same issues over and over again for more than a decade now (if not several decades) and I am very clear of what kind of stories our almighty leaders will come up with whenever they are facing any scandal or query.
I am wondering what a pathetic life our journalists and editors live – urging our leaders on the same matters for decades now and still dealing with the same problems again and again until today. Matters like more funding for Chinese and Tamil schools, equal rights for all and even on how the ‘owners’ of this land deserve more privileges and while the ‘migrant’ citizens don’t.
While arguing about the same matters over and over again, we still see the world through a pre-1997 Asian financial crisis Malaysian perspective.
Before 1997 Asian financial crisis, our country was in the world’s spotlight. We were deemed to be the role model for the developing world. South Korea successfully demonstrated to the world that they are qualified to be a First World country member after the Seoul 1988 Olympics Games.
Ten years after Seoul’s success, Malaysia was the next bright star of Asia with three major sports events for three consecutive years – the 1997 World Youth Cup (soccer), the1998 Commonwealth Games and 1999 Formula One Grand Prix. These three events were very successful and should have been good enough to pave the way for Malaysia to evolve into a First World country.
We seemed to have lost our direction after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. To put it bluntly, we failed to improve after 1997 and yet we still live in our own dreamworld. We still see China and India as our ‘poor’ Third World neighbours despite all their hard work to catch up and we still refuse to recognise the great universities of China and India, which produce so many bright scholars.
With so many Asian countries still lagging behind us – Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, Philippines, we are happy that we are better off than them. We, however, dare not look up to the stronger economies for we dare not face the very fact that the gap between us and Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan has widened to an insurmountable distance.
We dare not think globally – where is our position in the world economy? Where is our knowledge-based economy? Can we compete with the four Asian economic dragons? Do we work as hard as them? Can we compare our universities with the best ones in Asia? Do we still want to cheat ourselves that our economic ‘growth’ is merely the price increase of commodities (petroleum, palm oil) and not the workforce’s higher productivity and efficiency?
These are the questions that we dare not ask ourselves. It’s very true that every country has their own complacent citizens but it’s also equally true that it’s the non-complacent minds of the strong economies that save the day for their countries.
The Taiwanese corporate leaders work hard to keep their cutting edge in information technology after the rise of South Korea; the South Koreans are setting up more and more English language schools and are recruiting top scholars from the US to teach at their universities; Singapore continues to strive as a regional and world hub for as many fields as possible (trading, entrepot, sea and air transportation, academia, tourism, finance, medicine, etc) while China and India continue to liberalise their economies and are moving forward in technology with their strong academia and research abilities.
With the leaders in the seven most vibrant Asian economies are working harder in leading their respective economies to survive globalisation, our leaders are still mired in racial politics and arguing over the same matters for more than 10 years. And while we may blame our leaders, we Malaysians are also going on living with our complacent mindset.
With so many poor Asian countries taking ages to catch up with our level, we are still complacently satisfied with the position of being the developing world’s role model and happy to be behind Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and India.
We are happy because we ignore the truth that we can’t catch up with these top seven economies anymore and the others whose economic positions were previously behind us are working very hard to catch up with us. We are happy because we told ourselves we are not going to do as well as the top seven but at least we’ll be one of the best among the developing countries.
We are still happy and keep on telling ourselves that we are still doing very well and that is because we choose not to look at the truth surrounding today’s constantly changing globalised world.
We’re dealing with globalisation with a complacent mindset and ours is a perfect blend between two attitudes – the ‘refuse-to-change’ and ‘we-are-still-not-bad’.
When are we actually going to get rid of our complacent mindset and roll our sleeves up to face the true world?