August 9, 1995

Flexibility A Chinese Key To Success

ERIC ELLIS, Ipoh

"BEAUTIFUL Alice Springs: for a little touch of Aussie!"

Illustrated by hectares of green pastures and gambolling kangaroos, the roadside hoarding hawking a new housing development outside the old Malaysian tin-mining centre of Ipoh promoted an image of Australia not immediately obvious to most Australians.

But to Ipoh's old Chinese tin miners, that doesn't matter. The world may no longer want their tin but they still own the land the mines stood on and if middle-class Malaysians want a suburban utopia in the tropics called "Alice Springs", then that's the way it must be sold.

The phenomenon of Alice Springs and other developments like it around Ipoh, sprouting on the red earth of the abandoned tin mines, demonstrates the innate flexibility of Malaysia's Chinese community, which makes up about 30 per cent of the population and accounts for about 60 per cent of the national wealth. The Chinese also have a big political role, although one which has been negated in primacy during the past 14 years of the Mahathir era. Where Chinese were politically active across the ideological spectrum - the outlawed Communist Party of Malaya was a Maoist party comprising mostly ethnic Chinese -the Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir, has essentially co-opted Chinese moderates in return for a larger stake of his even larger economic pie. His United Malays National Organisation relies heavily on the Malaysian Chinese Association as the senior partner in the ruling Barisan Nasional, or National Front, coalition.

Chinese, mostly ethnic Cantonese from southern Guangdong province, flocked to Ipoh's tin mines in their thousands in the last century in a rush reminiscent of the way Australia and North America developed their own Chinese communities from the gold rushes.

In the mid-1980s the world market for tin dried up but that didn't faze Ipoh's Chinese. They simply built factories, industrial estates and condominiums on their mines and switched from being tin barons to industrialists and property tycoons.

"I don't know of anyone who lost their fortune," says Patrick Tan, Ipoh manager for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corp. "It's a little quieter than before but the local economy is still moving ahead."

Ipoh differs from other Malaysian centres in that it's lingua franca is Cantonese, and because of the tin riches has traditionally been richer than other cities.

The other main centres of Chinese culture in Malaysia, Penang and Melaka, tend to speak various dialects of Hokkien, the language emanating from China's Fujian province. The thrusting capital, Kuala Lumpur, is a prosperous polyglot city, reflecting Malay, Chinese, Indian and European fortune seekers who have flocked there in the recent boom years.

It has also been a tradition of Malaysia's Chinese community that the various dialect groups and clans keep their distance from each other, in business and in society. Further social divisions occur according to which migrant wave one is descended from - the so-called baba for the original, ethnically assimilated Chinese of Penang and Melaka, and the Sinkeh, the parvenu arrivistes who came in the last century.

The cultural melange of the Malaysian Chinese community is relected by the almost 4,500 Chinese social and business associations.

Traditionally, the Hokkiens of Penang and Melaka had little to do with the Cantonese of Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh and both had little to do with the Chiu Chou communities within them that hailed originally from the Guangdong-Fujian border regions or the dispersed Hakkas who congregated in Kuching and Kota Kinabalu.

That was strikingly evident in Penang where the ethnic and dialect difference was broken down even further to clans and village networks. On the Georgetown docks overlooking the old RAAF base at Butterworth, seven old piers, representing the seven main clan-based gongxi (companies or syndicates) still stand as relics of the days when clans traded among themselves.

But in modern corporate Malaysia, which is still dominated by ethnic Chinese businessmen despite the successes of Dr Mohamed's New Economic Policy in promoting the business interests of the native Malays, that's all changing.

Arch-networkers, the Chinese are mixing more in business, recognising their Chinese-ness or, more correctly, their Malaysian-ness above all else, even changing their lingua franca to speak to each other, do deals with each other. Ethnic Malays and Indians have begun sending their children to Chinese-speaking schools.

In Penang, where the economy has been growing at an annual 12 per cent in the Mahathir era, the overwhelmingly Hokkien membership of the influential Chinese Chamber of Commerce now has a young Chiu Chow president, Dato Larry Low Hock Peng, a London School of Economics graduate who controls a KLSE-listed empire, which includes the Perth group Media Technology Corp.

In Ipoh, where the local chamber of commerce has always spoken Cantonese in sympathy with its membership, the policy now is to conduct meetings in Mandarin, the one language all ethnic groups can understand but more importantly the official tongue of emerging China.

Booming Kuala Lumpur is spawning a whole new class of self-made millionaires such as Vincent Tan of the property-based giant Berjaya, with no obvious or long-standing family business tradition.

"It doesn't matter where people come from these days. It only matters if they can do the deal," says Larry Low.

"The old style of running a credit check would be to call someone in the bank, who might've been a relative or fellow member of the clan. That clan mentality is changing."

Penang industrialist Dr Neoh Soon Bin said Chinese companies were becoming "more modern". His own feed mill and food group, with annual sales of $US200 million ($270 million), is run along mostly Western management lines. He says the old adage that he has to employ relatives, or that it's inevitable his children will one day take over the company, is "no longer relevant".

"We use whatever works. We try to be as totally professional as we can. If a relative of mine cannot do the job, there is no role for them, zero," he says. The only relative in the self-made Neoh's firm is a brother.

"One cannot say the Asian way is totally wrong, but it's not totally right either."