Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia - Jurusan Antropologi ...

102 FROM ORANG KAYA BARU TO MELAYU BARA
bureaucrats), recently labeled, together with Malay corporate players, as Melayu
Baru. The ‘new’ middle class is based mainly in big cities, such as Kuala Lumpur,
Penang, Johare Baru, Kuching and Kita Kinabalu. But the ‘old’ middle class is
based both in the big cities and in the small rural towns and villages.
There is a noticeable difference between these two categories of middle class, at
least in the Malay case in Malaysia. Those in the old, manually-oriented middleclass,
most of whom are rural-based, seem to be dominated by the ‘rentier’ kind,
comprising individuals who have little or no previous background in the world of
business. In fact, most of them are children of Malay peasants. They, or their
family members, are not seriously involved in business either, except as ‘sleeping
partners’ to Chinese towkays, or tycoons, earning large sums of money in
commissions for getting government contracts using their political positions or
contacts. They are between 45 and 50 years of age, with secondary-school
qualifications, but their main asset is that, over the years, they have built an
enormous political power base at the grassroots by virtue of working and living
mostly in the rural areas. They became rich and joined the middle class through
the ‘business of development projects’ for the rural poor (Papenoe 1970; Mohd.
Fauzi Yaacob 1981).
I call these new rich Malay ‘rentier’ middle-class politicians whose position is
akin to telor dihujung tandok (lit. an egg perched precariously on a sharp horn),
and whose success or survival is largely dependent on personal resources and
initiative as political entrepreneurs and middlemen. Their rise and continued
existence as ‘middlemen middle-class’ Malays, who are not really highly educated
but who are extremely influential and powerful at the grassroots, rest heavily on
‘patronage politics’, which now takes the form of ‘money politics’ within UMNO
(Gomez 1990). They seemed to be UMNO’s main source of support and strength
and, at the same time, its weakness, because they can literally be bought and sold.
This is evident in the period since the advent of the NEP, when UMNO has
struggled and staggered from one leadership crisis to another and, indeed, was
‘brought back from the dead’ after being deregistered in 1988 (Shamsul 1988).
Although the majority in the new middle class were once kampung, or village,
kids, now they are based in urban areas where most of them are employed. That
they are what they are and where they are now is directly related to the
implementation of the NEP’s second objective of ‘restructuring society’, particularly
in the field of education. Since the advent of the NEP, the government has created
a number of special education-related programmes, which I call ‘express lane
programmess’–fully funded by the government–to increase the number of
qualified Malays rapidly, not only in the field of science and technology but also in
non-science fields (Siti Zaharah Sulaiman 1975). Within a period of ten years
(1976—85), thousands of graduates from these special programmes flooded the
Malaysian job market, some having graduated from local tertiary institutions, and
others from institutions in the USA, Australia and the UK. Since 1988, after
overcoming early unemployment woes, the government has managed to create
employment for these ‘NEP graduates’.