Abstract
Malaysia is one of the multi-ethnic, multi-culture and multi-religious countries in Southeast Asia. Malaysia is a classic case where the state has used wide-ranging preferential policies to manage ethnic problems. As a matter of fact, because of the ethnic politics in Malaysia, the ethnic preferential policies affected most domains of this country, including social, political and economic areas, especially Chinese education in Malaysia. The objective of this paper is to examine Chinese education in Malaysia under Malaysian ethnic politics. Data of this article is based on two sources, primary data were collected through interviews and the informants were selected based on purposive sampling and snowball sampling, meanwhile, secondary data were collected from journal articles, newspapers, website pages and online resources. Hence, the authors focused on these qualitative data especially the informants’ oral interviews to reach the research objective. Content analysis was used to analyze primary and secondary data. Findings of this study indicate that, there is no doubt that the development of Chinese education in Malaysia is closely related to Malaysian ethnic politics, though it has undergone a thorny way, it is not a problem to maintain the status quo of the Chinese education; however, it is impossible to seek a great breakthrough at the present stage. Nowadays, the development of Chinese education in Malaysia depends to a certain extent on the development of China and it has a positive correlation with the Malaysia-China relationships.
Highlights
Malaysia is one of the multi-ethnic, multi-culture and multi-religious countries in Southeast Asia
The development of Chinese education in Malaysia is closely related to Malaysian ethnic politics just like the author discussed above
All the informants including the politicians, elites and scholars acknowledge the fact of the existence of Chinese education in Malaysia; in addition, they believe that Malaysia is the only country that has the complete Chinese education system except China
Summary
Malaysia is one of the multi-ethnic, multi-culture and multi-religious countries in Southeast Asia. As a matter of fact, because of the ethnic politics in Malaysia, the ethnic preferential policies affected most domains of this country, including social, political and economic areas, especially Chinese education in Malaysia. The development of Chinese education in Malaysia has a long history since the large scale of immigration of Chinese to Malaya beginning in the nineteenth century (Raman & Sua, 2015). It has been almost 200 years since Wufu Shuyuan, which was the first Chinese school in Malaysia established in Penang in 1819 (Curdt-Christiansen & Hancock, 2014). Though Malaysian government stated that Malaysia respected the political reality of pluralistic society and gave Chinese communities a space to develop its own education, the Chinese communities generally believed that it was unthinkable if there was no long-term continuous resistance movement
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