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Economics History & heritage Politics & government

[2999] The three shadows of the 2000s and an eulogy for Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

Malaysia has not had many Prime Ministers, despite what it may have felt like during the merry-go-round contest that took place from 2020 until 2022. In this age where the idea of modern state is taken for granted, it is easy to forget that the modern country is young.

Even with a short modern history—modern meaning post-colonial—it is easy to claim that Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is one of those Prime Ministers who history are looking back kindly. Kindly, because when he passed away earlier this week, most have only kind words for him. Some wept. Kindly, because of the subsequent Prime Ministers who had far worse controversies and were utterly divisive.

The contemporary kindness appears incongruent to the intense emotions and harsh condemnations many felt and said no more than twenty years ago. Living through Malaysia of the 2000s, it is difficult to ignore the dramatic loss of popular support his administration underwent. I suspect there is a recency bias at work here for a majority of people. We forget.

Or maybe we forgive and forget because Abdullah was a kind man, and people generally return kindness with kindness.

I further suspect that we forgive because we now understand that many of the things that happened in the 2000s making life difficult for Malaysians was beyond his control. Living in the shadows of the 1990s was not easy for many. And living in the shadows of Mahathir Mohamad was difficult for Abdullah. But I think most importantly, we were all living in the shadow of a rising China, which could only be understood by looking back from the future, which is today.

The rise of China was a competition Malaysia struggled to address back then. The result is obvious. In the 1990s, Malaysia had a far higher per capita GDP relative to China’s. Now, it is about the same with China slightly ahead.

The rapid industrialization of China caused some Malaysian deindustrialization in the 2000s. As a result, Malaysia’s income growth of the 2000s was slower than it was in the 1990s. Already used to rapid growth, the 2000s growth slowdown (as I wrote in The End of the Nineteen-Nineties) felt like an era of unmet expectations. The Abdullah government fell victim to that. The unmet expectations fueled various dissatisfaction that were amplified by a newly popular and evolving technology that was the internet. Everything else—including the strong rise of energy prices that eventually led to the massive subsidy liberalization shock—was a second-order effect caused by China’s rise.

Abdullah cannot be blamed for China’s success. The story of China was a long-coming world-history in the making. He tried his best but the fact is, it was a tough condition for Malaysia that many would-be leaders would struggle to address. That condition was only reversed by the quantitative easing of the late-2000s/early 2010s, yet again beyond Malaysia’s control, however Najib would later like to claim.

We understand this—explicitly by those who keep a close tab on the global economy, and implicit by those who do not—and thus we forgive.

And from what we know, he had forgiven us too. Such was a gentleman.

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Books & printed materials

[2998] Reading Dina Zaman’s Malayland

When communal conflicts hit the Malaysian headlines like how it did during the recent temple controversy near downtown Kuala Lumpur, identities would experience a kind of centripetal force. In this case, the Malay identity gets solidify in the popular imagination as hardliners—politicians and ordinary people alike—rally up the crowd to join in the fight. This is true with the other communities too. When egging for a fight, it is easier to rally up a generalized identity: Malays versus Indians or Muslims versus Hindus. To appeal to emotions, simplify. The controversy has been dialed down, but the ill-feeling still lingers.

How do we fight off that centripetal pull all with the hope of undoing all those riled up emotions?

Within that context, one is tempted to take the idea of centripetal forces on identities and invert it. Instead of generalizing, maybe it is useful to de-generalize and make identity a complicated idea, which it is.

If that is so, then reading of Dina Zaman’s Malayland will prove useful. In it, the author lays out the various Malaynesses that exist in contemporary Malaysia and briefly show interest of these subgroups is not always aligned and in fact almost always diverges. The Malays are not a monolithic community, a fact that is sometimes easy to forget.

The book is not an encyclopedia of Malay subgroups and the author explores what she seems to consider the most influential ones only. She provides actual individuals behind the labels. In that way, the book feels less theoretical and more real.

One criticism that keeps popping at the back of my mind while reading Malayland is its length. There are multiple instances where the author approaches the interesting (such as events that shaped the subgroups) but almost every time that happens, the elaboration does not happen. The path ends abruptly. It is a tease and the readers are left to their own devices to satisfy their curiosity.

But there are different ways to read. Different books require different approach. To approach one in a way it is not meant to be read will left any reader dissatisfied. I think here is where the foreword by Tunku Zain Al-‘Abidin Tuanku Muhkriz is useful in framing the right approach:

The subjects in Malayland show case an even broader set of identities than its predecessor of seventeen years before—Dina’s 2007 book I am Muslim. [Page IX. Malayland. Dina Zaman.]

The purpose of Malayland, if I as a reader could be so daring, is to show the existing diversity within the Malay community. It is neither an encyclopedia nor an academic work, which several critics of Malayland, I feel, implicitly rest their (and mine too) criticism upon. The book is window for those who do not already know of identity diversity and there are many who still do not know while living in a cocoon where their outside world is a caricature of prejudice. For them, Malayland is a hook to change a worldview.

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Conflict & disaster

[2997] The broken city walls of Mandalay

All countries are beautiful in their own way and Myanmar is a beautiful country indeed.

When the country just emerged out of its isolationist cocoon and optimism was sweeping through its population in the early 2010s, I had the opportunity to witness the liberalization of Myanmar firsthand by travelling approximately 2,000km for about 3 weeks from Yangon to Mandalay by buses, trains, cars, motorbikes and boats. What surprised me at first back then was that Yangon did not strike me as a particularly poor city. It seemed the democratic dividend was paying off.

But as with most countries, the reality in the capital does not always reflect that of the whole country. Kuala Lumpur feels and looks like an advanced ultramodern economy when taken out of context of the whole of Malaysia.

There is beauty in urbanity but it was the slow progress of modernity in the 2010s that made the country beautiful. Beyond the limits of Yangon within its glittering Shwedagon Pagoda and a confusing mix of brand new right-hand and left-hand drive vehicles on the road all at once, life was slower. The old ways still held fort. When I reached the famed romanticized city of Mandalay after a long train ride sitting next to a Buddhist monk, I felt I was entering a different country.

Myanmar has since slided back. The Rohingya crisis has made the country less popular in the region. Democratic progress has been rolled back. Civil war has taken hold. When I found myself travelling in northern Thailand recently, driving along the Myanmar border, Thai troops maintained high alert, stopping everybody with no exception to ensure that the situation remained safe on this side of the world. On the back of the range that divides Thailand from Myanmar, I could spy deep into the Shan state. Things were quiet and they gave no clue of the raging civil war happening far across the mountains.

Somewhere in Sagaing across the Irrawaddy river from Mandalay (I cannot recall the location exactly now but I think it was in Sagaing), there was a large cuboid temple standing 40 to 50 meters tall. The temple had a large crack running from the top to the bottom caused by an earthquake during pre-colonial times. Back then as I stood in wonder of the crack, that earthquake was an academic curiosity.

A strong earthquake has struck Mandalay this week and pictures of devastation are coming out online. Bridges have collapsed. Pagodas cracked and crumbled. Houses gone. Parts of the old city walls now suffer from gashes. I have been to some of those places and it breaks my heart to see them in such devastation.

I hope we Malaysians will help Myanmar even in our current state of politics where racism, xenophobia and general meanness is on the rise. Malaysia is the chair of Asean this year and Asean has failed the people of Myanmar in so many ways. This is a chance to redeem ourselves from all those failures, even if the window is only for partial redemption.

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Books & printed materials

[2996] Reading The Flash Boys ten years after purchase

There was a time ages ago when I was enamored with the idea of finance. Just out of university, finance was the in thing. It was during this phase that I picked Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker. The author describes his bond trading experience in the late-1980s and early 1990s. He has written other books over the years: Moneyball and The Big Short among them. But it took me roughly 10 years after picking up Liar’s Poker to return to Lewis. Sometime in the mid-2010s, I bought The Flash Boys from Kinokuniya Kuala Lumpur.

But it would take me another 10 years to read and finish it. I have a bad habit of buying multiple books and later forgetting about them completely. On my shelves, I think between a fifth and a tenth of books there are unread. I am glad to say there is one more book out of the unread list.

The market has changed over the past 20-30 years and the contextual contrast between Liar’s Poker and The Flash Boys is huge. The former was set in a world where there were people on the trading floors taking bids and making offers for all kinds of financial instruments. By the 2010s, the floors were empty, the financial instruments had increased in complexity beyond the comprehension of most finance-people and computers had taken over buying and selling activities. Now, the most advanced markets are driven by algorithmic trading (before everything was labelled as AI), computing power and ultimately, super high-speed internet. That is the context of The Flash Boys: it is about high-frequency trading or HFT.

The greatest lesson I get from The Flash Boys is something that I already know: not all competition is good and for the financial markets, fragmentation (including multiple listings) largely creates room for inefficiencies.

The proliferation of stock exchanges has created unfair arbitrage opportunities for those with access to the most computing power and the fastest speed. That room for arbitrage exist in less than a tenth or even a hundredth of a microsecond, a window too small for a human to notice but a lifetime for computers. Here, having competing stock exchanges means having lags introduced into the whole financial system and that lag will be manipulated by high-frequency traders that thrive on delays too small for the human senses to detect. That manipulation comes in the form of frontrunning legitimate transactions which raises the cost a great majority in the market with HFT firms pocketing the additional charges.

This is just one example where competition is counterproductive to the market. For stock exchanges, we really do want to create a deep, one-location transparent market. Anything else creates information asymmetry.

Categories
Books & printed materials Conflict & disaster

[2995] Reading The Lady from Tel Aviv

Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine was the first in a set of books I bought and read during the height of Israel’s latest aggression against Palestine. Khalidi’s work turned out to be the authoritative must-read book of the year and it reframed things I thought I knew about the Israel-Palestine conflict from before. A mixture of personal and national history, the book helps me understand the messy Israeli-Palestinian history easier, compared to the effort of going through Wikipedia’s voluminous and even messier entries.

Khalidi’s is excellent but non-fictions sometimes are unable to capture certain aspects of the real world. Over the years, I have discovered that the work of fiction can close the gap. So, I went on another spending spree purchasing a few Palestine-linked literature. One that I actually read (as opposed to being left on my shelf) was Rabai Al-Madhoun’s translated work The Lady from Tel Aviv. Originally written and published in Arabic in 2009, The Lady was translated by Elliott Colla into English and then republished a year later.

In summary, The Lady is a story about a Palestinian exile’s return to Gaza post-the Second Intifada. The book appears to a semi-autobiography of the author. The three layers of reality governing the story suggest as much: the author Al-Madhoun (a journalist himself) has his exiled journalist protagonist as an author working on a homecoming novel.

For quite a heavy subject, The Lady is a light reading. So light that I feel the novel could do with more details. The book skims the surface regarding the mistreatment Palestinians faced by Israeli occupying forces, the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and the general conflict between Fatah and Hamas. It is a picture of hopelessness that Gazans embrace as a way of life, that all the troubles they face are taken as given as stoics would.

Despite all the conflicts, corruptions and injustices, he does not explore any of them deep enough. He is content to have them mentioned and unexplored, taking it as a universal obvious truth unworthy of elaboration. And then there are loose ends left to the readers’ imagination. That I think is the most frustrating thing about The Lady.

But Al-Madhoun might be aware of this particular criticism even as he was writing the novel. In a scene where the lead character, the journalist, visits his blind childhood friend Muhammad (Abu Saber) for the first time in 40 years, who is now a poor beggar with nobody else to rely on:

I think I am going to leave. I shut my eyes, unable to keep looking at the shape Muhammad is in. This is an unrecognizably distorted copy of the boy whose friendship had lit up my childhood. Abu Hatem waits for me a short way off. I turn away so no one can see the tears in my eyes.

[…]

Abu Hatem turns the key in the ignition and Muhammad realizes I am about to go. He waves his cane around the air and screams so loudly it splits my heart. As we drive away, he calls out, “Who are you—you stranger who is not a stranger?”

[…]

“Why didn’t you tell Abu Saber who you were?” asks Abu Hatem. “You broke his heart—and mine too.”

“I couldn’t do it. It would have been worse had he known it was me. If he knew I saw him like that.

 

That makes me wonder whether the lack of details is just Al-Madhoun’s way to protecting the readers from the difficult reality in Gaza.