This chapter will compare and contrast the “internal state architecture” and incentive structures faced by meso-level leaders in Malaysia and Indonesia. This will be done to set out the environment in which meso-level leaders in the two countries choose priorities, formulate goals, and derive income.

Up until 1998, the two countries shared a number of significant institutional similarities. For much of their recent past, Malaysia and Indonesia have variously been termed as “authoritarian” (Pepinsky 2009, p. 40) or “semi” and “pseudo” democracies, respectively (Case 2002, pp. 29, 99). Both were characterized by considerable concentration of power in the executive, centralized bureaucratic decision-making “removed” from popular debate, de facto one-party political systems, and limits on political expression. It will be argued that the incentive structure this provided regional leaders was one heavily tilted towards national policies and priorities. However, this political incentive structure overlay an important distinction. Malaysia's fiscal structure contained an important indirect incentive for meso-level leaders to court investment and provide market-enhancing goods. Indonesia's did not.

The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis was a critical juncture for both countries, after which their respective political and institutional contexts developed in significantly different ways. While subjected to considerable stress, the Malaysian regime emerged largely intact, preserving the existing incentive structure. In contrast, Indonesia embarked on a far-reaching political reform process, of which decentralization was an integral part. The net effect has been to increase the autonomy of meso-level leaders and the weight of local-level issues in provincial policy-making. However, while the country's fiscal structure sees a greater quantum of resources being transferred to regional leaders, the new financial incentive structure does even less to reward initiative and financial self-sufficiency.

Malaysia

Malaysia has a federal system of government and many of the features of a parliamentary democracy. Its structure of governance is comprised of: a federal government and three federal territories; thirteen state governments; and approximately 150 local authorities. The country's constitution allocates responsibilities and revenue sources for the centre and states, with separate lists for unique responsibilities as well as a concurrent list for shared responsibilities.

Despite its formal identity as a federation, Malaysia's system of governance is “top-heavy” with a majority of responsibilities and revenue sources under federal control. Policy domains commonly associated with meso-level governments such as education, transport, and policing are attributed to the federal government in Malaysia.

This book has sought to shed light on the circumstances under which sub-national governments choose to pursue economic growth and structural transformation. This was done by comparing and contrasting the case of Johor and the Province of the Riau Islands. These two territories had very similar economic models, prioritized the same sector and have also sought to attract investment from the same source. Furthermore, both were constituent parts of countries with similar economic policy frameworks and centralized political systems. However, following a critical juncture, Indonesia proceeded to decentralize power and responsibilities to the sub-national level. The incentive structures facing meso-level leaders in the country evolved as a consequence. Malaysia, for its part, proceeded in the opposite direction, proceeding to centralize more tasks at the federal level.

To this end, Johor and the Riau Islands were analysed over three time periods: 1990–97, when their national contexts were the most similar; 1998–2003, when their national contexts were in transition; and 2004–13, when they had matured and new incentive structures were in place that led to important divergences.

This exercise has yielded the following insights.

The arguments put forward by many proponents of decentralization and, in particular, the first generation fiscal federalists do not apply to either Malaysia or Indonesia. First, it is very difficult for most of the underlying conditions to be met for there to be effective and credible “competition” between states and provinces for investment. While criteria such as the free movement of labour and capital within national borders or hard budget constraints for sub-national governments are relatively easy to satisfy, others such as autonomy for sub-national governments or the institutionalized allocation of political authority are much more difficult to obtain. Second, the contention advanced by the second generation fiscal federalists that the “benevolent” nature of meso-level leaders cannot be assumed is also borne out by this analysis. Despite meso-level leaders in Indonesia receiving more responsibilities and the overall movement of the country's governance structure in a more “market-preserving” direction, we did not always see constructive and determined attempts to promote economic growth.

The framework proposed by the second generation fiscal federalists (SGFF) provided more traction. Thus, an analysis of the revenue base of the Johor and Riau Island governments has proven more instructive. Of the two territories, Johor operates in a fiscal context more espoused by the SGFF school.

COMMUNISM — THE “GOD” THAT FAILED LIM CHIN SIONG

As seen, in an interview with historian Melanie Chew in 1995, Lim Chin Siong denied being a Communist. This was a prevarication. We now know that privately, on 14 December 1982, Lim had finally admitted to his CPM ties. That day, in an interview with ISD officers, Lim conceded that he had indeed met Fang Chuang Pi @ the Plen as alleged by Lee Kuan Yew in his Battle for Merger radio talks more than twenty years before. Lim added at another meeting with the ISD on 11 January 1984 that he had met the Plen three times between the late 1950s and the early 1960s and these meetings had been initiated by the Plen through a third party. In further interviews later that year, Lim revealed that in 1954, the CPM — through Lim's ABL superior Loo Yeh Shing — had instructed him to join the PAP and make contact with Lee Kuan Yew, “as the latter was planning to form a political party”. This instruction was the genesis of Lim's involvement in politics. Lim Chin Siong, therefore, quite unlike the portrait painted by the Alternates, was no mere left-wing anti-colonial activist who had spontaneously emerged from the teeming, energetic ranks of the anti-colonial Chinese-educated milieu of the tumultuous 1950s. Rather his career in the CUF “appeared to have been planned and charted from the start by the CPM”. Lim's admission of his CPM ties was certainly a long time coming. Following his detention in Coldstore in February 1963, to be sure, he had consistently resisted giving a full account of his past CPM involvement. Even from 1964 onwards, when he had even claimed to have lost faith in global Communism, he revealed nothing. The Special Branch and later ISD assessment was that his “own ideological struggle and his insistence on abiding by his principles, presumably borne out of his reluctance to implicate his comrades and associates”, were reasons as to why he “agonized and vacillated whether to accept Government's terms for release, which included giving a full account of his activities”.

THE ALTERNATES’ COMPLAINT ABOUT GOVERNMENT SOURCES

In constructing the New Singapore History in general and their version of Coldstore in particular, the Alternates advance the argument that the original Singapore Story is flawed and “deeply partial”. This is not just because the prevailing master narrative has been written by the winning PAP side, it has also been based on previously classified official documents — confidential correspondence between London, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, minutes of meetings, position papers and handwritten notes — said to be deeply permeated by “the rhetoric of counterinsurgency” that reflects “Cold War imperatives” and is “dominated by its stark political categories”. This “prose of counterinsurgency”, argues T.N. Harper, is manifested in the “plausible yet Olympian language of the intelligence abstract; the measured tone of the despatch; the bureaucratic-passive tense”; and allegedly a “ ‘careless and impressionistic’ use of the evidence”. He asserts that not only have most “journalists and observers” providing the historical record “unquestioningly embraced its assumptions”, much of the prevailing accounts have “backprojected categories of counter-insurgency that were not so hard or discrete at the time”. According to such logic, mainstream accounts of the Singapore Story in general and the Malayan Emergency and Operation Coldstore in particular, such as, inter alia, the works by John Drysdale, Dennis Bloodworth, Aloysius Chin and Lee Ting Hui, precisely because they are “based on Special Branch sources”, are eo ipso problematic. At the time of writing, incidentally, Hong Lysa warned of the pitfalls of reading the work of the “poisonous and scandalous Dennis Bloodworth”, presumably because he was given access to inter alia, “ISD [Internal Security Department] records”.

Such sentiments are misleading. Contemporaneous and knowledgeable observers who watched the Singapore Special Branch in action in 1956 declared that it was “unquestionably the world's greatest authorities on Communism in Asia”. At any rate, a related charge by elements within the Alternate constituency is that those historians and other observers who attempt to defend the Singapore Story, in particular those employed by national security think-tanks linked to the Singapore government, are ipso facto themselves suspect of having an immutable counter-insurgency/national security and pro-government bias.

THE ALTERNATE HISTORY OF LIM CHIN SIONG

To recapitulate, the titular leader of the BSS and the central figure in the ambitious Alternate attempt to construct a New Singapore History — with Coldstore as its point of departure — has been the enigmatic Lim Chin Siong. It is worth reiterating how Lim has become almost a mythical symbol amongst the Alternate community. One former Coldstore detainee, Dr Lim Hock Siew, on the occasion of Lim's passing on 5 February 1996, declared:

Lim's long-time friend and comrade Fong Swee Suan recalled that people who listened to the former's speeches likened his performance to “watching a classic drama”, while the PAP's Toh Chin Chye marvelled at how “huge crowds” used to greet him at PAP rallies. Even Lee Kuan Yew admitted that Lim's speeches had a “hypnotic effect”. Lim Chin Siong's personal charisma always seemed to make an impression. When the Australian journalist Peter Hastings interviewed him in September 1961, he made the following observation:

To be sure, a great deal has been made of one major Path Not Taken by Singaporeans: having Lim Chin Siong instead of Lee Kuan Yew as independent Singapore's first Prime Minister. The following anecdote related by David Marshall when he was Chief Minister in the mid-1950s has been well trodden in accounts sympathetic to the Alternate perspective:

THE ALTERNATES’ “POLITICS-AND-NOT-SECURITY” ARGUMENT

To recapitulate, the Alternate claim is that Coldstore was an exercise that could not be justified on standard security grounds, for several reasons. First, the threat was exaggerated: while there certainly was an anti-colonial Progressive Left movement in Singapore in the 1950s to early 1960s, and it at times turned violent as in the Hock Lee incident of mid-1955 for example, this was not necessarily a movement that was closely manipulated by the CPM behind the scenes. In short, it was not a Communist United Front (CUF) in the traditional sense of the term. As the former leftist Dominic Puthucheary put it, there was “a movement with a wide range of political views from extreme left to social democratic right which attempted to create an alternative to a colonially-designed society, an embryo for creating a new Malaya”. The Alternates make great capital of a contemporary analysis in April 1962 by the Security Liaison Officer (the MI5 representative) in Singapore, Maurice L.B. Williams, who was sceptical of a Singapore Special Branch analysis of the threat:

Related to this perspective is the view that the CPM as a whole was by 1963 heavily weakened due to arrests and hence its “influence on the radical politics of Singapore in the late 1950s and early 1960s was, if anything, weaker than it had been between 1945 and 1951”.

Second, the British felt constrained by the fact that they could only agree to any arrest programme if there was clear evidence that Lim Chin Siong and company were about to depart from the constitutional path to embark on violent action. In his April 1962 threat assessment, SLO Maurice Williams had dismissed any notion of evidence of such a Communist conspiracy.

While the first-ever school textbook on Singapore history — encompassing the period from the founding of modern Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 to independence from the Federation of Malaysia in 1965 — appeared in 1984, the more or less formalized “master narrative” of Singapore's ensuing political evolution, the so-called Singapore Story, “coalesced in the late 1990s”. This was “when the key moments in the country's political history as an emerging postcolonial entity were identified and plotted into a national narrative”. In 1997, then Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong formally launched the National Education (NE) programme, an official attempt to redress the prevailing poor knowledge of Singapore's past on the part of young Singaporeans, many of whom had apparently not even realized that Singapore was once part of the Federation. The ultimate aim of the NE programme was to ensure that future generations of Singaporeans were adequately socialized into the Singapore Story, regarded as “objective history, seen from the Singaporean standpoint”. This exercise was by no means idiosyncratically Singaporean. New nations, ever since the emergence of secular nationalism as a potent unifying ideology in Europe in the late eighteenth century, have tended “to rely on skillfully constructing the connections between the past (real or imagined), the present and the future”. The purpose of deliberately crafting such national narratives has been “to encourage members of a putative national community to imagine themselves as sharing a special bond and destiny as members of a nation”. Hence in Singapore, it is acknowledged that government efforts “at yoking history to the cause of nation-building”, even “if particularly insistent and didactic”, are not unusual, for a “national history” that possesses “resonance and credibility” helps “foster national identity”.

While Alternates like Thum Ping Tjin go so far as to declare that the “historiography is clear on the lack of evidence of communism” in Singapore's post-war history, most voices within the Alternate constituency argue instead that while the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) organization was “central to the left”, and its “cadres played a pivotal part in trade unionism and popular front politics”, its role has nevertheless been exaggerated in the Singapore Story. T.N. Harper for instance argues that the insurrection “now seems like a concatenation of forces from below”, over which the CPM “exercised little direction”. For their part Loh Kah Seng and Michael Fernandez insist that it is “simplistic to blame the violence” perpetrated by leftist unions in the mid-1950s “solely on communist instigation”. The former leftist Dominic Puthucheary, challenging the oft-quoted metaphor in the Singapore Story that Lee Kuan Yew had to “ride the Communist Tiger” to power in Singapore, articulated the Alternate position well:

The sum total of the Alternate position, therefore, is that while there certainly was an anti-colonial Progressive Left movement in Singapore in the 1950s to early 1960s, this was not necessarily one that was closely directed by the CPM behind the scenes. Hence Harper suggests that the “very idea of a ‘Communist United Front’ is perhaps a misnomer: most of the groups caught up in leftist popular radicalism” were “neither communist, united, nor a front for anybody but themselves”. Michael Barr and Carl Trocki echo this assessment, arguing that while the CPM “could offer moral and spiritual leadership, the party on the ground in Singapore had little influence over everyday events”, and that “[s]tudent and labour movements, strikes and demonstrations were often the result of spontaneous actions by the individuals directly involved”.

Our discussion of mortality trends and differentials will depend solely on the official statistics generated from the registration of births and deaths already reviewed briefly in the previous chapter. The death statistics compiled from the registration system is quite complete on account of the strict rules governing the compulsory registration process. It is mandatory to obtain a death certificate issued by a doctor or an authorized person to register the death as well as to commence with the burial ceremony.

GENERAL MORTALITY TRENDS

As in the case of fertility, the long-term trends in mortality will be examined in terms of three-year periods from 1970 onwards in order to reduce the fluctuation in the annual figures. In Table 9.1 are therefore given the annual average deaths and the crude death rates for threeyear periods. The population denominator employed in the calculation of the crude death rate is taken as the average of the three mid-year populations in each of the three-year periods.

Except for the two periods from 1976 to 1981, the annual average number of deaths increased from 72,769 in 1970–72 to 132,192 in the latest period 2009–11. The rate of increase ranged from slightly below 1 per cent to about 10 per cent. It should however be emphasized that the rise in the number of births over the years was merely a reflection of the increasingly larger population as well as the ageing of the population. The crude death rate, on the other hand, followed a downward path. From a level of 6.5 per thousand population in the period 1970–72, the crude death rate moved down to reach the low of 4.4 in 2000–02, and then went up to 4.6 in the latest period. In the years ahead, there is a possibility that the crude death rate might display a gentle upward trend as the population continues to age.

The crude death rate is not a very good measure of overall mortality since it is distorted by the age structure of the population. An older population will invariably yield a higher crude death rate than a younger population. Despite the inherent shortcoming of the crude death rate, we can say that the general level of mortality during the last four decades has been going downward.

In recent years nuptiality has come to be recognized as an integral part of the study of the demography of any country, largely because the formation and dissolution of marital unions have an important bearing on the level of fertility. We may regard marriage as an event that marks the beginning of the potential period of childbearing and marital dissolution as the end of this period. It is also recognized that age at marriage can affect the level of fertility and hence the rate of population growth. In this chapter an attempt is made to examine nuptiality trends and patterns in Malaysia during the postwar period.

Our study of nuptiality will be based on marital status data collected in the population censuses and classified into single, married, widowed and divorced. The data reflect unions in which the partners have participated in some form of legal marriage solemnized according to the various marriage laws. We should always bear in mind that the modern form of consensus unions among persons who have never been married according to either legal or customary rites is rather rare in Malaysia. We should also note that it is not possible to investigate nuptiality by means of comprehensive data derived from marriage registration records since such annual statistics have never been compiled and published regularly.

MARRIAGE CUSTOMS AND LAWS

The great diversity of religions that we have observed in an earlier chapter necessarily implies that it would be quite difficult to have a common legislation to govern all the various types of marriages taking place in the country. It was inevitable that over the years separate laws were introduced to regulate these marriages which are solemnized according to the various religious and customary rites. There are one set of laws governing the marriage of persons both of whom are Muslim and another group of laws meant to regulate all the other marriages contracted between non-Muslims. Almost all these marriage laws have their roots during the colonial period, introduced in different parts of the country at different times as determined by the extent or concern of British rule or influence at that time.