Is Malaysia Suffering From Inferiority Complex?

When you ask why Malaysia is not as developed as its tiny next-door neighbour, Singapore, the standard retort is that Singapore is a tiny nation and by implication tiny is easy to develop.

The argument is spurious. There are bigger countries than Malaysia, its other neighbour Australia for example, which are more developed than Malaysia.

If you persist on insisting that with all the natural resources including oil that Malaysia is blessed with, we should do better than Singapore, they will tell you that if you are not happy, you could always go back to tiongsan (China) if you are a Chinese, or go back to India if you are an Indian.

Come on, can't Malaysians talk about development without resorting to the racial angle? Is development a racial thing?

Aren't Malaysians concerned about the state of the country's economy? For many years now, the Malaysian economy is not doing well or not doing as well as it should, notwithstanding what the government says.

Had it not been for oil, Malaysia would have gone bankrupt. A Malaysian cabinet minister had said so himself, although maybe not in so direct terms.

Even though China opened it economy only some 35 years ago, it has replaced Japan as the world's second largest economy. The retort to this is that China is a big country and with so many people and the system of government it has, it can do anything and develop quickly.

But they conveniently forget that although American is more or less the same size as China it has a much smaller population and a different system of government, yet it is the world's largest and most developed economy.

Ah, the classic symptom of inferiority complex - if you can't win an argument, just say anything inane or refuse to accept or see the truth.