Wong Chin Huat
VISITOR’S VOICE
Interview with Wong Chin Huat ❯❯
Political Science ❘ Sunway University, Malaysia
CSEAS Visiting Research Scholar: May to July 2024
FAVORITE THINGS
Traveling
I live my life (at least this life) only once. I love to see how others live their lives, imagine how I would live if I were them, and try living like locals if I am invited to join. I am helplessly curious. Staying still for a long period of time is a punishment to me.
Food and Drink
I love to eat good food, and when possible, to cook. Food is more than an arrangement of energy, nutrition, and flavors to sustain your life. Food is culture. Food connects the stomach to the heart. Even drinks – including fermented wines and distilled spirits – may contain cultural significance. I love to try local brews as I am “spiritually inclined.”
Images
I am a visual person. I understand the world most effectively by seeing rather than by hearing or sensing. I see patterns in images, and meanings in patterns. I try to paint and take photos, but I am not good at either. I love movies because the combination of moving images and sounds gives you the experiences of other lives, real or fictional.
MUST HAVE GEAR for FIELD RESEARCH and WRITING
My empirical works benefit significantly from casual observations and conversations with people from different walks of life, more than from formal interviews with consent forms and recording devices. I do formal interviews only in limited circumstances for accuracy and accountability, especially when I need to quote someone on something politically sensitive. So, the three gears I need the most are not physical.
Curiosity and the Ability to See Hidden Patterns
The first is curiosity and the ability to see hidden patterns, as observations can happen at any time without permission. For example, when I travelled in Southern Thailand for leisure, I noticed that most restaurants had signboards sponsored by the beverage producer Singha, but the signboards were different depending on the restaurant. While most advertised Singha beer, some only depicted Singha mineral water. I soon realized that the latter were in halal restaurants run by Muslims. With curiosity and an analytical mind, every field trip can show you something new that books have not told you.
Ability to Build Rapport and Trust
The second is the ability to build rapport and trust, which begins with empathy. Society may train us to judge others by one’s own standards, but no person will open up to you if they feel judged. As we only live once, we should instead appreciate the opportunities to see and even role-play how others live their lives. To build rapport and trust, we should seek to understand. We must overcome any fear—which we may have been socially trained to have—that understanding may lead to agreement and subsequently the loss of our identity. Beyond empathy, learning the local language is a significant help. More than effective communication, it is a sign of respect for the other party, and no one despises someone who respects them.
Memory and the Ability to Organize Information
The third is memory and the ability to quickly organize information. In many circumstances, you may not be able to turn on your recorder or take out your notepad without disrupting the flow of conversation. It is useful if you can quickly organize information into more memorable blocks. If cameras are allowed, make sure you turn on the location feature. The time stamp and geo location information combined can help you sort out the sequences and fill in gaps where your memory may fail.
Interview
Research Should be Driven by Curiosity than Conviction
01
Please tell us about your research.
My research at CSEAS is on “Party Competition and Inter-communal Relations in Malaysia: Reassessing the Electoral System after Democratic Transition.” I hope to answer three related questions: first, is political centrism or moderation incentivized more by power-sharing than electoral alliance? Second, could the current majoritarian electoral system permit a healthy political competition that is not divided along ethnic and religious lines? And third, what change in the electoral system would encourage moderation in Malaysia’s new political landscape?
Malaysia’s existing first-past-the-post (FPTP) system is credited for promoting centripetal politics by incentivizing monoethnic political parties to pool their votes in multiethnic constituencies. The FPTP did drive the formation of the UMNO-dominated multiethnic Alliance in 1952 and sustained path dependency for its hegemonic successor, Barisan Nasional (BN), both of which were dominated by the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). However, I argue that the FPTP may now be a liability for Malaysia. It has failed to establish a benign British-style two-party system after the end of UMNO’s one-party predominance.
The majoritarian political system, which hinges on but surpasses the FPTP, has suppressed healthy competition. Assured of winning a simple or even a super majority, the ruling coalition sees no incentive to treat the opposition fairly. Denied resources and space, the opposition parties are incentivized to take flank and communal-moralist positions to attack the ruling coalition. This dearth of both resources and room for healthy competition has caused three BN-emulating multiethnic opposition coalitions since 1990 to disintegrate after failing to win power. The BN also suffered the same fate, as it was effectively reduced to the UMNO after its ouster by the Alliance of Hope (PH) in 2018. This led the UMNO to team up with its former arch-rival, the Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS), to attack PH for selling out Malay Muslims.
Malaysian politics has now experienced two significant shifts: first, since 2018, toward an unexpected form of bipartisanism consisting of one multiethnic coalition versus one monoethnic coalition; and second, since 2020, from a single-block majority government to hung parliaments and post-election coalition governments. While the former encourages ethnic-outbidding instead of moderation, the latter may force a more level playing field and an open-ended practice of power-sharing. However, FPTP may strengthen the former and gradually eliminate the latter, leaving Malaysia in a possibly worse scenario than before the 2018 transition.
I hope to explore how a change in the electoral system may allow Malaysia’s democracy to move beyond ethno-religious fault lines to focus on policy-based differences.
02
Do you have any essential reads (books) that you can recommend to younger people?
For those interested in understanding how ethnic politics operates, I recommend Kanchan Chandra’s 2003 book Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India from Cambridge University Press as a good introduction. Chandra helps us see why communal politics may be rational for both the elites and masses, drawing mainly from India’s champion of the lower castes, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). For an overview, Donald Horowitz’s 2001 Ethnic Groups in Conflict. (2nd Ed) from the University of California Press is a classic to turn to.
For those interested in learning more generally how three building blocks of the modern political order—state, the rule of law, and accountable government—emerged and evolved across several civilizations, I recommend Francis Fukuyama’s 2012 The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution from Profile Books.
For a classic that explains political economy with some simple yet ground-breaking ideas, I recommend Mancur Olson’s 1971 The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups from Harvard University Press.
03
What is your ideal image of a researcher, and do you have any advice for those who aim to become researchers?
An ideal researcher for me is someone who rigorously seeks answers to questions and discovers new questions to answer. As the world is never neatly organized, they should be prepared and able to uncover unintended consequences and modify their theoretical understandings. They should not be confined by political correctness, or worse, impose ideological boundaries on others’ intellectual quests, with or without the backing of political and/or religious authorities.
An ideal researcher would and should have their own sets of values, but for empirical studies, these values should not dictate their analysis. Even though the research may be driven by values and passion, as is natural in most cases, value judgement should come only at the last stage of analysis (if relevant), and not stand in the way of any inconvenient discovery that may challenge one’s ideological leaning.
If a research study can convince ideological opponents with its empirical discoveries or analyses even when they may still disagree with the conclusion or recommendations on normative grounds, then it is good research. Ultimately, research is about advancing inquisitive rigor, not spreading moral passion.
If you want to be a researcher, you should be driven by curiosity more than conviction. You should be eager to understand before you judge. The world we live in is so disappointing, often not because there are too many bad people, but because we have not found better solutions to resolve conflicts. Research should help us to better understand problems and find solutions, not become a moralist wall preventing conversations.
In some societies, the dominant ideology discourages understanding of others for the fear that understanding may lead to agreement with others and subsequently loss of one’s identity and values. If you have lived in such societies and you want to be a researcher, you must consciously reprogram yourself that understanding does not erode your identity and values, so that you can be bold in asking questions and seeking answers.
04
What are your future ambitions as a scholar?
I hope to deepen my understanding of party competition and social cleavages in Malaysia and other divided societies. I hope I can contribute useful insights in institutional design to make democracy more resilient and sustainable.
Modern democracy is primarily based on division, which enables competition and choices on one hand and checks and balances on the other. It requires both public mobilization and compromises. While polarization has always been a threat to new democracies in Global South plural societies, it is now also a threat to established democracies in the West. Unchecked partisanship and group conflicts fueled by populism, conspiracy theories, and hatred are damaging Western democracies and eroding the intrinsic appeals of liberal democracy.
I hope to expand my research beyond Malaysia to other plural societies in the Global South to develop comparative insights that might be useful in the global debates on democracy backsliding and institutional design.
Before pursuing an academic career, I have been an analyst and advocate in Malaysian politics since 1998. I can see how the majoritarian political system has been preventing democratic consolidation after the transition in 2018. Beyond writing for various media, I hope to publish books and journal articles that can help convince both the political elites and the public that Malaysia needs to move towards a consensus democracy, starting with parliamentary reform and electoral system change. The incentive structure must be changed so that inter-dependence among Malaysians of different backgrounds can be adequately recognized and enlightened self-interest can replace self-righteous discourses prevalent across ethno-religious communities.
05
What was the most difficult moment or challenge in your life, and how did you overcome it?
I lost my first love at age 23, which was devastating. It forced me to ask all the “what if” questions and wonder what alternative lives I may have led. As time passed, I realized that perhaps I was destined for a different path. Increasingly, one does not want to trade the rich journey one has travelled for some unknown “what-if” paths.
06
Why did you choose CSEAS, or what is your expectation here?
I chose CSEAS for its environment, which fosters scholarly focus and reflection, and for the opportunities it provides for intellectual exchange with illustrious scholars not only from the Center, but also from other institutions in Japan. I am very grateful for the three-month fellowship and for my first visit to Japan. While here, I hope to finish two journal articles on majoritarianism and the electoral system in Malaysia as building blocks for an eventual monograph.
(May 2024)
* The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.
Wong Chin Huat is a political scientist based at Sunway University, Malaysia where he serves as the deputy head (strategy) for the Asia headquarters of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). Before receiving his doctorate in comparative democratization at the University of Essex, UK under the supervision of Professor Sarah Birch, he read economics at the University of Malaya and later Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the National University of Malaysia (UKM). Drawing from years of experience in writing political commentaries, he later taught journalism at Monash University Malaysia before returning to political science research. The four disciplines have enriched how he looks at issues, analyzes events, and plans actions.
He grew up in a family grocery in a multiethnic village in Kampar, Perak, Malaysia (founded by migrants from Kampar, Sumatra in Indonesia). After attending a Chinese-medium primary school, he received a high school and university education in Malay. He writes professionally in English, Chinese, and Malay, now with a weekly column in the Malay daily Sinar Harian. These diverse backgrounds taught him to be empathetic and pragmatic. He appreciates that different people have different interests and aspirations, yet people can still work together with inter-dependence, enlightened self-interest, and respect.
Visitor’s Voice is a series of interviews to showcase our fellows while they stay with us at CSEAS. The interview highlights their research activities while also introducing the people and episodes behind the work, must-haves for field research and writing, book recommendations, future ambitions, etc., in a question-and-answer format.