The amount of labour available for the production of goods and services in a country is determined by a variety of demographic, social and economic factors. The size of the total population and its composition with respect to sex and age determine the maximum limits of the number of persons who can participate in economic activities. Other factors such as the race composition, the degree of urbanization and the proportion of married women play an important part in influencing the proportion of the population, which will be represented in certain age groups in the working population. Among the more important economic and social factors are the industrial structure of the economy, the mode and organization of production, the per capita income and the traditional attitudes towards working women and working children. By and large, demographic factors are the major determinants of the size of the male working population since by convention nearly all men are engaged in some form of gainful work from the time they reach adulthood until they approach the retirement age. On the other hand, socio-economic factors seem to exert a greater influence on the size of the female working population.

CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS

The labour force statistics of a country can be collected by means of the gainful worker approach or the labour force approach.1 The older gainful worker concept was widely used before the Second World War and even during the early postwar years in some countries. In Peninsular Malaysia, it was last used in September 1947 when the first postwar census of population was conducted. According to this concept, the respondents were requested to state their usual occupation or gainful work from which they earned their income without reference to any time period. Those who were ascertained to have engaged in gainful work were considered as in the labour force, while those without any such work were classified as outside the labour force. Apart from the absence of a reference period to which the data could refer to, this method of collecting statistics cannot provide figures for the employed and the unemployed separately.

According to the labour force approach, all respondents aged 10 years and over were asked to state whether they were working during the reference period, and if not, whether they were actively looking for work.

INTRODUCTION

Malaysia has been one of the most important areas of migration ever since the establishment of British colonial rule in Penang in 1786 and in other parts of the country in the nineteenth century. The large and sustained immigration was mainly due to the demand for labour in the public works and primary production sectors, the excellent prospects for trade and commerce, and the law and order attendant on British rule. Such forces of attraction coupled with liberal immigration policies, were reinforced by equally strong repelling forces in the immigrants’ countries of origin. Natural calamities, political upheavals, population pressure, and lack of economic opportunities induced the immigrants to leave their countries for Malaysia at a time when the supply of labour from the indigenous Malays was neither adequate nor forthcoming.

In the early days, the immigrants would usually leave their families behind in their own countries and came to Malaysia not as permanent settlers but as “bird-of-passage”. With their earnings, quite a number were able to send regular remittances to their families, made occasional visits home, and eventually returned to their countries after acquiring some wealth or on retirement. In the course of time, however, an increasing proportion of immigrants brought their families along, sent for their families or married local residents and remained in the country permanently. But their numbers did not alter the generally transient character of the population, which persisted until the outbreak of war in Malaysia in December 1941. The Japanese Occupation, the increasing supply of local labour in the postwar period, and the strict immigration control from the 1950s have put an end to large-scale immigration. At the same time, an increasingly significant proportion of the prewar immigrants have come to regard Malaysia as their permanent home.

During the prewar period there were essentially three main streams of migration into Malaysia: the northern stream from China, the western stream from India, and the relatively less important stream from the then Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in the south.

The large inflow of immigrants from China and South Asia during the British colonial period has led to the emergence of a multiracial population that has persisted until today. Since the immigrants brought with them their religious practices different from the Bumiputera's, the population also became multi-religious in character. The close identification of ethnicity with religion reinforced the sharp divide between the different ethnic communities in the country. Some difficulties and challenges have always been encountered in the collection and presentation of statistics on ethnicity and religion, and they will be discussed in their respective sections.

The collection of information on ethnicity has assumed greater significance in recent years since it exerts a major influence on the formulation and monitoring of government policies and programmes designed to eliminate the identification of race with economic activities. Undoubtedly, ethnic data compiled from the census would be essential for a fuller understanding of the country's demographics in view of the influence of ethnicity on the various population characteristics. The item pertaining to race has always been included in the population censuses conducted in Malaysia, though some changes in the definition and presentation of the statistics have been introduced over the years.

A better appreciation of the ethnic information requires an explanation of the definition of the different ethnic terminologies used in the population censuses. The definition of Chinese has always been quite clear-cut, referring to people of Chinese descent regardless of their country of birth or citizenship. The term Indians has not been consistently defined in past censuses, but it is now employed to refer to persons from the Indian subcontinent such as Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Sri Lankans. The definition, also disregarding citizenship or birthplace, makes sense because these people display fairly common social and cultural traits, and hence similar demographic characteristics.

The term Bumiputera was introduced in the pan-Malaysia Censuses to accommodate the emergence of a large variety of indigenous communities after the creation of Malaysia in 1963. The Bumiputera group is now divided into Malays and Other Bumiputera in most of the tables presented in the census reports. The latter refers mainly to the Orang Asli in West Malaysia and the numerous small indigenous tribes in Sabah and Sarawak.

The size and structure of the population of Malaysia at any point of time are determined by the interactions of migration, fertility and mortality in the immediate past. While an earlier chapter has dealt with migration, this chapter will be devoted to an account of fertility and the next on mortality. As in any country, the statistics required for the analysis of fertility and mortality are derived from the compulsory registration of births and deaths. The registration system is under the overall charge of the Registrar-General in the National Registration Department, and in each state there is a Registrar in charge of the Registration Department. In each state there are also registration centres situated in hospitals, police stations and city halls in urban centres, while in the rural areas registration of vital events can be made with authorized persons such as village headmen, headmasters and estate managers. The registration laws stipulate that the time allowed for registration is 14 days for live-births and still-births and 12 hours for deaths.

The birth and death statistics are compiled and published by the Department of Statistics. The vital statistics published by the Department of Statistics since the formation of Malaysia in 1963 are not comprehensive and uniform from year to year. For most years, the statistics are more comprehensive for West Malaysia than for East Malaysia, and hence the absence of national figures for the whole of Malaysia. Some of the difficulties encountered in obtaining national figures will be discussed in our analysis of the published data in regard to certain aspects of fertility and mortality discussed in the two respective chapters.

ANTINATALIST PROGRAMME

The provision of family planning services on an organized basis dates back to 21 October 1954 when the Family Planning Association of Selangor was officially established as a voluntary organization. With the support of individuals, firms and foundations, the Association was able to open two clinics in Kuala Lumpur in January 1954. These clinics, the first two of its kind in the country, ran only weekly sessions after office hours with the assistance of volunteers. In the early days the clinics were fairly well attended by many women and, encouraged by this modest success, more clinics were established in Selangor.

INTRODUCTION

In this final chapter, we will attempt to examine the most plausible course of population trends and patterns in Malaysia in the near future. This can be accomplished by projecting the mid-year base population into the future on the basis of certain assumptions concerning the future path of fertility, mortality and migration. The population projections are usually prepared by the component method, which involves the separate projection of the number of males and females in each quinary age group of the population. The figures for the base population by sex and quinary age group from age 0 to, say, age 85 are derived from a census of population.

Since the base population is divided into quinary age groups, the projections would be computed for five-year intervals of time so that at the end of the period all the survivors of one age group would have moved into the next older age group. Each cohort of the sex-age group is diminished to account for the impact of mortality over time. This step requires a set of five-year survival ratios (Px) which are deemed to represent mortality in each cohort during specific periods of time subsequent to the date of the base population. A multiplication of the relevant survival ratio in each sex-age group by the relevant survival ratio will give us the estimated number of persons five years older at a date five years later. A repetition of this procedure will yield the projected population ten years older than those at the base date and at a date ten years later.

The second step involves the task of estimating the future number of children born in each five-year time interval subsequent to the base date in order to fill in the vacuum in the first age group 0–4 at periods of time five years later. To begin with, it is necessary to fix the most plausible assumption concerning the future cause of fertility in terms of the total fertility rate with its equivalent age-specific fertility rates from age 15 to 49. These rates are then employed in conjunction with the female population within the reproductive age range to derive the estimated number of births in the various five-year periods.

This book, a project of the Malaysia Study Programme in ISEAS, is a sequel to my earlier book on The Population of Peninsular Malaysia published in 1988. The book was based on materials derived from the early population censuses and other related sources pertaining to the eleven states in West Malaysia. It was not possible for me to include Sabah and Sarawak at that time because of the paucity of comparable data for these two states in East Malaysia. The situation improved significantly following the formation of Malaysia on 16 September 1963 when a wide range of pan-Malaysia statistics began to be made available from the four Population Censuses conducted in 1970, 1980, 1991 and 2000 and from other sources dealing with births and deaths, marriages and divorces, labour force, etc. The emergence of favourable conditions have allowed me to complete in 2006 an entirely different book covering the whole country, and hence The Population of Malaysia as the new title.

The second edition of the book has been substantially revised and expanded to take advantage of the new data that can now be obtained from the latest Population Census conducted in 2010 as well as from other relevant sources since the original version was published. One of the major changes introduced was the splitting of the original chapter on Fertility and Mortality into two separate chapters, each subject being discussed in greater detail as more information is at our disposal. The last chapter on Future Population Trends has also been revamped to include the results of the latest official population projections. The chapter on External Migration, a topic that has a lasting impact on the population dynamics of the multi-ethnic country, has been enlarged to include more materials. Finally, a Foreword written by Craig Calhoun has now been included. I hope readers of the new edition of the book will find it more useful and illuminating.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of numerous institutions and individuals for helping me to access the research materials. My thanks go to the University of Malaya Library, the National University of Singapore Library, ISEAS Library and the London School of Economics Library where I visited during my frequent trips to London.

The movement of people within Malaysia has assumed greater significance as a result of the official concern about the unbalanced distribution of the population among the various parts of the country. This concern was explicitly expressed in the development plans adopted from the early 1970s onwards, and specific strategies were spelled out to, among other things, redistribute the population. The plans seek to distribute the population to sparsely settled rural areas with agricultural potential, to spread out the urban population more evenly throughout the country, and to rearrange the population with the view of attaining greater economic balance among the major communities. The underlying purpose of the last strategy as stated in the Third Malaysia Plan was to free the Bumiputera from their despondence on subsistence agriculture and to allow them to participate in the “modern rural and urban sectors of the economy at all levels”. In fact, the Second Malaysia Plan has spelled out the overall aim of the population policies was meant to achieve “economic balance between urban and rural areas and to eliminate the identification of race with vocation as well as location”.

Internal migration may be defined as a change of residence from one community or geographical unit to another within the national boundaries. The movement of people within the country can be examined in terms of the following categories:

1. 1. Migration among the thirteen states, known as inter-state migration.

2. 2. Migration among the various districts within a particular state. This is known as intra-state migration at the district level.

3. 3. Migration among different urban and rural areas. This can be classified into urban-urban, urban-rural, rural-urban, and rural-rural.

An urban area is defined as a conurbation with 10,000 or more inhabitants. The rural-urban type of movement is more commonly known as urbanization. Each state is sub-divided into smaller units known as districts, with different number of districts in each of the thirteen states. In view of the national aim of achieving a more balanced socio-economic development among the various ethnic groups and among the various regions of the country, the population censuses have always collected statistics that can enable us to study internal migration.

GEOGRAPHICAL SETTING

Malaysia consists of two distinct geographical segments separated by the South China Sea, Peninsular (or West) Malaysia in the west and East Malaysia in the east. The long narrow peninsula of West Malaysia extends from latitude 1° 20’ north to latitude 6° 40’ north, and from longitude 99° 35’ to longitude 104° 20’ east. It is situated in a central position within Southeast Asia, being an extension of the Asian land mass as well as part of the wider Malay archipelago. Beyond West Malaysia's northern land border lies Thailand, and its immediate neighbour in the south is the small island state of Singapore joined to it by the old railand- road causeway and the new second-link bridge, both cutting through the narrow Straits of Johore. In the west just across the busy Straits of Malacca is the large elongated island of Sumatra, part of the multi-island Republic of Indonesia.

East Malaysia occupies the north and south-west portion of the huge island of Borneo. It extends from latitude 0° 85’ north to latitude 7º 35’ north, and from longitude 109° 60’ to longitude 119° 35’ east. To the south, it shares a common land border with Kalimantan which is an Indonesian territory, and in the north across the Sulu Sea is the Republic of the Philippines. Because of its proximity, the people have considerable contacts with these two neighbours, perhaps more so than with West Malaysia. Though East Malaysia has a land area of 198,160 square kilometres that is larger than the 132,090 in West Malaysia, it is not that important viewed from many aspects. For one thing, it contains only two states, Sabah and Sarawak as compared to the eleven states and the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, the hub of the Federal Government, in West Malaysia.

West Malaysia extends some 740 kilometres in length from Perlis state in the north to Johore Bahru town in the south, and about 322 kilometres in width at its widest point. The total land area approximates 132,090 square kilometres, slightly larger than England without Wales. It has a coastline of nearly 1,931 kilometres, covered in many places with mangrove swamps, sand bars and sandy beaches.

We have observed the dominance of migration in the demographic history of Malaysia from the early nineteenth century to the outbreak of World War II in December 1941. This was followed by a lull of about five decades up to the 1990s, and thereafter a resurgence of large-scale migration surfaced and continued until nowadays. In contrast to the first wave of migration in the early years being monopolized by people from China and South Asia, the second wave was characterized by inward movement from nearby Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries. In both periods, Malaysia was forced by the inadequate supply of labour from the local population to admit hoards of foreign workers into the country to work in the various sectors of the economy experiencing labour shortages. On their part, the foreigners were driven by a desire to secure a regular and larger source of income to support their families back home.

In the course of time, many Chinese and South Indian workers in the first wave chose to stay in the country, thus contributing to the diminution of the Bumiputera population and the emergence of a multiracial community. In more recent years, the principal source of migrant worker emanates from nearby Indonesia where the people belong in the main to the same religious and ethnic background as the Malays. This has resulted in a gradual rise in the proportion of the Bumiputera population at the expense of the Chinese and the Indians, who were already experiencing a much lower level of fertility. No less important is the impact of current immigration concerns about the prevalence of illegals, particularly the Indonesians, with all the attendant economic and social problems.

In interpreting the figures in respect of population size and growth, we should be mindful of the population censuses not being conducted on a uniform time interval of ten years as practised in most countries. The holding of the third pan-Malaysia Census in 1991 has resulted in a break in the intercensal time interval, 10 years for the 1970–80 period, 11 years for the 1980–91 period and nine years for the 1991–2000 period.

In this chapter we will examine the structure of the population in terms of sex composition, age structure, educational attainment and citizenship pattern. The structure of the population has evolved over many decades in accordance with not only demographic determinants like migration, mortality and fertility, but also social and economic forces. These variables have exerted their influence in different ways and in varying degrees on each aspect of the population structure. In Malaysia, international migration has left its pervasive and permanent imprint on many facets of the population. The two important topics concerning ethnic composition and religious pattern have already been examined in Chapter 4.

SEX COMPOSITION

In a closed population unaffected by migration, the sex composition is determined by the proportion of boys and girls at birth, but this is counter-balanced by males being subject to higher mortality so that the eventual sex ratio of the general population is very near normal with fairly even numbers between the two sexes. However, in a country where migration of predominantly males has been a major force of population growth, we can expect the sex ratio to deviate from the normal pattern. This is true in the case of Malaysia where predominantly male migration has always been significant, resulting in more males than females in the population. However, in the course of time a slow movement towards a more balanced sex ratio has taken place, first as the proportion of female immigrants increased, then as the volume of natural increase became larger, and latterly as the flow of migration diminished.

The distribution of the population by sex and the computed sex ratio defined as the number of males per thousand females are presented in Table 6.1. During the first wave of migration before World War II, the male migrant workers had no intention of settling in the country, and hence they left their families in their own country. The extremely uneven sex ratio commenced to improve after the war when the previous large-scale migration ceased, but this improvement took a very long time. This is the explanation for the population in 1970 to continue to have more males than females, 5,266,100 and 5,173,300, yielding a sex ratio of 1,018 males per 1,000 males.

Demography is both destiny and social structure. Understanding the patterns and dynamics of population reveals key directions of social change and describes the way a society is organized. This is demonstrated amply by Professor Saw Swee-Hock's magisterial The Population of Malaysia.

First published in 2007, Professor Saw's account has proven an indispensable resource to policy makers and social scientists alike. It is crucial for understanding modern Malaysia, but also to bringing Malaysia effectively into comparative analyses. This last is all the more important because Malaysia is an increasingly prominent country in Southeast Asia and on the global stage. Indeed, one might suggest more broadly that the demography and social science of Southeast Asia has become more globally significant as the region develops and increases its global economic participation and leadership, and as it integrates in pursuit of both security and prosperity.

Moreover, Malaysian population dynamics are not simply a local example of general global trends. Malaysia has very specific population patterns that add distinctive purchase to comparative accounts. Its blend of internal and external migration, for example, and the relationship of this to ethnic and religious identities, labour force and economic growth, and national integration shed light on global issues but also help to give the country its own identity — and to some extent issues to address.

As Professor Saw shows, Malaysian population patterns are the result both of planning — including explicit population policies — and unplanned social dynamics. Professor Saw situates these in historical and indeed geographical perspectives that are both useful. Understanding the ways in which Malay, Indian and Chinese populations have interrelated with each other and the land and the organisation of production and trade over centuries is crucial background to understanding not just ethnic or religious patterns today, but basic demographic patterns like population distribution and labour force participation.

In its new addition, Professor Saw's account remains both an authoritative source and an accessible overview. It has been brought up to date with new data and new insights. I am happy to recommend it.

With the exception of the last two written pages that employ an apparently early form of surat incung — referred to here as incung script — the Tanjung Tanah manuscript TK 214 (hereafter referred to as “TTms”) under inspection is written in what has been characterized as Later Pallavo- Nusantaric script (Kozok 2004, p. 39). The present chapter will be concerned exclusively with the part of the manuscript written in this latter script, that has a certain resemblance to Kawi (the script used in Old Javanese).

I must confess that I had practically no prior experience with Later Pallavo-Nusantaric scripts, and would have faced insurmountable difficulties reading TTms if not for the path breaking work of decipherment already done by Poerbatjaraka, published in Kozok (2004, pp. 46–53).

Some surprise had initially been articulated in view of the circumstance that TTms was not written in the Arabic-based Jawi script of later Malay texts. However, for the early date that has been elicited, the late fourteenth century, use of an Indic script is not surprising. The contemporaneous 1380 CE gravestone at Minye Tujuh, although Islamic, is in the so-called Old-Sumatran script (Marrison 1951; Molen 2007; Stutterheim 1936).

THE SCRIPT

Out of practical considerations, I will introduce a standardized set of characters adapted from the variants appearing in the actual text of the manuscript. This font set is compared with the script used in some other inscriptions and documents in Table 4.1 (cf. also a.o. Holle 1882; Kridalaksana 1982, pp. xxi, xxiv–xv).

Consonants

Like in other Indic scripts used in South and Southeast Asia, each basic character (akṣara) typically represents an open syllable consisting of an initial consonant and a default vowel. It may be safely assumed that this vowel is an -a, as it is in Sanskrit and in Old Javanese. Besides akṣara-s for consonant-initial syllables, there are also vowel-initial syllables that will be inspected separately below.

DISCOVERY

In his function as taalambtenaar (language official) for Sumatra, the Dutch scholar, Petrus Voorhoeve, visited the Sumatran regency of Kerinci in April, and again in July 1941 to survey the Kerinci documents held by the people as sacred heirlooms in private collections. During the first visit, he made a list of 183 items — published only in 1970 — and during the second visit, he copied and transliterated a large amount of manuscripts while others were photographed to be transliterated later. The primary school teacher Abdul Hamid from the school Kota Payang 1 accompanied Voorhoeve to Kabanjahe where he helped to complete and type the transliterations. In the middle of August 1941, he returned to Kerinci, taking with him the new list, which now comprised 252 items, and completed transliterations of about half the texts. By the time Voorhoeve was called up for military service on 8 December 1941, he had completed nearly all transliterations. His secretary made six copies, two of which were sent to Kerinci, one for the Controleur's office in Kerinci, and one for the owners of the manuscripts. “I do not know whether these copies ever reached their destination before the Japanese invasion; those sent to Batavia certainly did not arrive there. Not a single of the transliterations was found after the war”, he wrote in an article entitled “Kerintji Documents” (Voorhoeve 1970, p. 371). A small number of photographs and a few copies made by hand are all that survived; these are now kept in the library of the KITLV in Leiden.

Five years after Voorhoeve wrote his “Kerintji Documents”, the British anthropologist C.W. Watson conducted fieldwork in Kerinci. Armed with Voorhoeve's list of 183 items, he went to a number of villages and tried to persuade the clan or lineage heads to let him see the documents. As a result he was able to transliterate a number of manuscripts with the assistance of Iskandar Zakariah — the same person who now, more than thirty years later, assists me in documenting the sacred heirloom of the people of Kerinci.

The manuscript known as TK 214 found at the village of Tanjung Tanah, Kabupaten (Regency) Kerinci, Jambi Province, has been convincingly dated to the second half of the fourteenth century. The manuscript provides a new and extremely important type of information about ancient Indonesian civilization in general. It is equally significant for efforts to reconstruct the cultural history of the region from which it originates. Kerinci is rather remote from most of Sumatra's twenty-first century centres of population, cultural development, and political power, which are mainly situated along major rivers in the lowland plains, but in ancient times (i.e. before 1500) the distribution of these centres was reversed: most of them were located in fertile highland valleys near mountain lakes. Kerinci was one of them. Other important early historic cultural centres flourished at Lake Ranau in Lampung, on the Pasemah plateau of South Sumatra, in the Rejang Lebong valley of Bengkulu, in the three valleys or Luak nan Tigo of the Minangkabau highlands, and in the vicinity of Lake Toba.

Kerinci's environment is propitious for farming: resources include plentiful water including a large lake (the surface of Lake Kerinci is 783 metres above sea level), rich volcanic soil provided by Mt. Kerinci, minerals, and a healthy cool climate free from lowland tropical diseases such as malaria. Kerinci is connected via the lake's outlet the Merangin River to the Batang Hari river system, the eastern lowlands of Jambi, and the Straits of Melaka. The Batang Hari is the second largest river system in Sumatra, covering 40,000 square kilometres (the Musi River's drainage in South Sumatra covers 61,000 square kilometres) (Bezermer 1921, pp. 528–30). Kerinci's volcano provides rich soil for the Batang Hari's upper tributaries, but the benefits of these do not reach the lowlands of Jambi Province; “the lands of Lower Djambi are poor or bad” (Mohr 1944, p. 437).

Kerinci has long been connected to both the east and west coasts, and to northern and southern mountain valleys, by footpaths (Hoop 1938, p. 200). One of the main sources of Kerinci's importance was its gold, the exploitation of which has traditionally been supervised by local chiefs. In the seventeenth century, Kerinci gold was exported to the British station in Bengkulu, several hundred kilometres to the south.