Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times Barry Wain (grave mercy .TXT) 📖

former British colonies. But this reordering was a rough guide only, serving to obfuscate as much as illuminate the foreign policy drama that unfolded.

A scant three months after taking office, Dr. Mahathir snapped Malaysia out of its pro-West default position by instituting a Buy British Last policy. Any government purchase from Britain had to be referred to his office for clearance, together with an alternative, non-British tender. Four months later, Dr. Mahathir dropped the other shoe by unveiling the Look East policy, nominating Japan as the country from which Malaysia could learn and benefit most as it industrialized. So while Malaysia looked East with fresh eyes, it also symbolically turned its back on the West as represented by the former colonial power, temporarily at least.

As Malaysia's major trading partner and biggest investor at the time, Britain was a risky target for punitive action. Malaysia had been a member of the Commonwealth since independence, and Britain was the country of choice for most Malaysians studying abroad. The British had defended Malaysia during Confrontation with Indonesia and throughout the communist insurgency, and Kuala Lumpur still had joint defence arrangements with London.[20] Dr. Mahathir, however, regarded Britain as a nation in precipitate decline, a long way from its glory days.[21]

While Japan in many ways was a logical development model, it did not figure at all in the priority list. From the ashes of World War II, Japan had risen to become the world's second-largest economy, turning out products from cars to computers and cassettes that were conquering all markets. Singapore, ever ready to seize a competitive edge, launched a "Learn From Japan" campaign in 1978, and even some Americans were suggesting they should imitate selected Japanese production and managerial methods. For Dr. Mahathir, Japan also had some less obvious attractions that he had noted on trips to the country as trade and industry minister. The capitalist system that Japan practiced was strongly directed by the state, while still allowing the private sector to flourish, in contrast with the laissez-faire approach inherited from Britain and generally favoured by the West.

Critically, Dr. Mahathir believed not just Britain but the West itself was no longer worthy of automatic emulation. He theorized that the post-World War II loss of colonies and the wealth that went with them deeply affected the Western psyche. Moreover, the U.S. debacle in Vietnam undermined self-confidence and further "enfeebled" Western spirits. Over time, Dr. Mahathir observed, despondent Western powers had abandoned the values, systems and qualities that made them great — for one thing, opting for unlimited freedom over discipline. Their decline was reflected in a new generation "sporting shirts and jeans that are unseemly, torn, patched, dirty and old", and young men with long hair and in worn slippers or barefoot. What disturbed Dr. Mahathir was that Asians, Malays included, were mindlessly aping these "bad" habits.[22] "The East is now going through a phase in which independence in the physical sense has been achieved but the influence of Western imperialism is still pervasive," he wrote in the 1970s.[23]

Loosening the straightjacket of colonial thinking was an unstated aim of Look East and Buy British last. As an endorsing editorial in the New Straits Times commented, "Only Anglophiles are likely to be flabbergasted...Their bias has been inherited from another era under Pax Britannica".[24] The twin moves had the desired effect, shocking the Malaysian establishment to the core.[25]

Dr. Mahathir let it be known that Buy British Last was the result of negative British attitudes towards Malaysia built up over a long period. One sore point was the start of a London-Singapore supersonic Concorde service on a temporary route through Malaysian air space in 1977: The British "never asked us, never even informed us", he said.[26] The prime minister was also irked by the imposition of higher tuition fees for foreign, non-European Economic Community students in Britain, among them thousands of government-sponsored Malaysians. He was unhappy, too, about the treatment of Malaysian officials visiting the UK, and the way two prominent British companies had restructured under the New Economic Policy (NEP) without giving preference to bumiputras. Britain's refusal to grant Malaysia additional landing rights at Heathrow airport was also resented. The last straw was the London Stock Exchange's revision of its takeover code shortly after a Malaysian state-owned corporation acquired venerable British plantation company Guthrie Corporation in a four-hour share-buying blitz in 1981, dubbed a "dawn raid" by critics. To Dr. Mahathir, the introduction of a seven-day waiting period suggested the Malaysians had acted improperly, and that the British wanted to block similar actions in future. It was especially galling to Dr. Mahathir that Guthrie management, the British government and some newspapers called the purchase back-door, or subtle, nationalization. He considered nationalization unethical, and any hint of it likely to deter investors.

Regardless of those irritations, Dr. Mahathir was bound to adjust what was often called a special relationship, which he regarded as unequal. He had no compunction about severing the sentimental attachments to Britain held by Tunku Abdul Rahman and his two successors, all of whom were British-educated and from the traditional Malay ruling class. Far from sharing their unquestioning attitude to British intentions towards Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir, the outsider, always suspected the worst, until it was proven otherwise.

Not that his fiercely anti-colonial outlook was the result of personal experience. By his own telling, he enjoyed a happy childhood under the British and "yearned" for their return after Japan's defeat in World War II.[27] Dr. Mahathir's explanation for the depth of his resentment — he realized British weakness during the swift Japanese conquest of Malaya, and "I became very agitated" after the war when they tried to impose the Malayan Union[28] — was true enough but insufficient to explain his conversion. After all, when the Malayan Union proposal died within two years, most of his contemporaries moved on.

What really bothered Dr. Mahathir was his perception that colonization had left Malaysia with a "psychological burden" that weighed heavily long after the colonialists had retreated: "the belief that