Malaysia may have become more polarised amid intense race rhetoric and systemic problems, but individuals have agency to do their part and private companies have a role to play in ensuring deeper ethnic integration, Transport Minister Anthony Loke has said.
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Speaking to Malaysians living in Hong Kong at an event organised by the Malaysian Chamber of Commerce Hong Kong and Macau on Wednesday night, Loke noted that although their country was divided along class and education lines with social media amplifying hate speech, most residents still coexisted peacefully.
In Malaysia, while Malay is used as the medium of instruction in most national schools, there are also local vernacular schools that teach the same syllabus to students in Mandarin and Tamil to preserve minority cultural identity.
Loke noted that while Singapore was a good example of a country that was able to push for greater ethnic harmony thanks to the foresight of founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, the city state had a “totally different environment, [with] totally different politics”.
“Now, with such a polarised political situation, any such radical changes will be very hard to achieve – I’m very frank about it – as much as I want to see more unity, more interaction, more integration among the various races,” said Loke, who leads the Chinese-dominated multicultural party Democratic Action Party.
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He was responding to a question on whether the education system in Malaysia could be reformed to do away with vernacular schools and instead place everyone in the same schools.