. “If you don’t push them, they won’t move,” Zhu Zhenming, a scholar of Southeast Asia at the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, said about the Malaysian authorities. “It’s mostly to do with their administrative management capabilities, but also their culture.” He added that Malaysia was “too lacking” when it came to “dealing with disaster management” — “not because they don’t want to do it, but because they cannot.” That sense of frustration, and perhaps condescension, has come through even in official Chinese remarks that were intended to be diplomatic. On Tuesday, Huang Huikang, the Chinese ambassador to Malaysia, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, that “the Malaysian government has insufficient capabilities, technologies and experience in responding to the MH370 incident, but they did their best.” In some ways, the complaints reinforce a belief that many Chinese have long held: that their political culture is superior to those of Southeast Asian nations. In that worldview, Southeast Asia has throughout history been a less-developed region that looked up to China and tried to both appease and imitate it. Malaysia, a country dominated by an ethnic Malay, mostly Muslim population with a significant ethnic Chinese minority, is no exception, in the eyes of many Chinese. The plane crisis is strengthening those prejudices, analysts say.“The image of the Malaysian government has dropped in the eyes of the Chinese government and the Chinese people,” said Bo Zhiyue, a scholar of Chinese politics at the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore. “Compared to the Malaysian government, the Chinese government is quicker and more responsive and so forth.” He said the episode has reinforced the view among Chinese that their system “is not inferior to other systems, and is in some ways superior to other systems in its efficiency.” .
Posted on: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 13:15:40 +0000
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