focus
After finally and openly reaffirming support and loyalty to Team B, one of the vice-presidents of MCA, Chan Kong Choy has started to 'contribute' his share of 'firepower' to the crusading campaign against Team A, led by president Dr Ling Liong Sik.On Dec 21, the New Straits Times quoted Chan as casting doubts on the number and legal status of MCA's new members announced by the party headquarters recently.
According to Chan (as quoted by the New Straits Times ), from June until late December, a total 138,000 applications for new membership, which is tantamount to 15 percent of the total MCA membership, had been approved.
Chan was also quoted as saying that no details have been given by the party headquarters on these new members despite him repeatedly requesting for it from the national organising secretary of the party.
The national organising secretary of MCA is Perak MCA strongman and state councillor Ong Ka Chuan who is an elder brother of Ong Ka Ting, a vice-president and former political secretary to Ling. The Ong brothers are certainly pro-Ling and known in MCA circles as 'smart' organisational operatives for Ling and his loyalists.
Earlier, on Dec 8, the president of MCA and paramount leader of Team A, Ling was quoted by the Sin Chew Jit Poh Chinese daily as saying that MCA now claims a membership of 1,038,000.
Allegations of membership 'manipulation' by the dominant factions in MCA to increase voting strength in party elections are not novel. Charges of 'phantom members' and 'phantom branches' have been recurrent themes in the incessant power struggles within the second largest component party in the ruling coalition since its inception in 1949.
Besides the numerical aspect of the dispute, the characters of some of these 'new members' are being widely questioned, and the 'prosecution' is not without legitmate ground.
Deposit-taking scandal
For example, Wang Choon Wing, a 'new member' who was appointed to investigate the causes of the MCA youth fracas on Aug 3 and also to head the three-man 'receivership' committee of the suspended MCA Youth, has a criminal record and was once jailed for criminal breach of trust for nine months.
Wang, 61, was elected a BN/MCA member of parliament for the Lipis constituency in Pahang in the 1986 general elections and was later appointed by Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad as the deputy minister for culture, youth and sports.
However, in Febuary 1987, Wang was arrested and charged with criminal breach of trust in a deposit-taking cooperatives scandal. He was later convicted and jailed for nine months and released on Nov 9, 1988.
According to University Malaya political economist, Edmund Terence Gomez in his book entitled Money politics in the Barisan Nasional : "Wang Choon Wing held the post of tresurer in Komuda, under the chairmanship of Kee Yong Wee. Wang Choon Wing was also an MCA organising secretary and central committee member.
"Born in 1940 to a lower middle-class family, he worked as an ice-cream seller, construction worker, and peon after receiving his primary and secondary education in Chinese schools. In the early 1960s, he was associated with the Socialist Front and was nominated to run for the Bangsar constituency in the 1964 general elections.
However, before polling day, he was arrested and detained under the Internal Security Act (ISA) for a year. He joined the MCA in the late 1970s and was nominated as the party's candidate for the Kuala Lumpur Bandar seat in the 1982 general elections, but was defeated by DAP's Lee Lam Thye." (p.54)
According to a dossier kept in the China Press archives, Wang's exact birth date is July 11, 1940.
Komuda, meanwhile, was the name of a troubled deposit-taking cooperative associated with MCA leaders in the 80s, and in which the cash deposits of many ordinary Chinese members were found to have been misappropriated to save companies owned by some MCA leaders.
Elections first, trial later
On Dec 21, Sin Chew Jit Poh quoted another vice-president of MCA, Dr Fong Chan Onn as confirming that Wang had been allowed to re-join the party on Oct 2.
Another two former MCA leaders who automatically lost their memberships after being convicted and jailed for criminal breach of trust in 1987, Tan Koon Swan and Kee Yoon Wee, were also allowed in as 'new members' of MCA together with Wang on the same day.
Tan Koon Swan 61, former MCA president from 1985 to 1987 and a self-made millionaire was also a BN/MCA member of parliament for several terms, being first elected in 1978 in the parliamentary constituency of Raub in Pahang. In the 1986 general elections, he was elected in the Gopeng parliamentary constituency in Perak.
Soon after he was elected president of MCA on Nov 24, 1985, he was arrested by the Singaporean authorities on charges of criminal breach of trust involving a company he controlled, Pan-Electric Industries Ltd (Pan-El).
However, according to Gomez (ibid: p.57) who quotes from an NGO booklet entitled Tangled Web: Dissent, Deterrence and the Oct 27, 1987 crackdown in Malaysia (Sydney, Cabra, 1988):
"Though (Tan) Koon Swan had been arrested in late 1985, the Malaysian and Singaporean authorities had apparently come to an agreement to allow (Tan) Koon Swan to lead the MCA into the 1986 general elections before his trial began."
A dossier on Tan kept by Gomez points out that he first worked for the National Electricity Board, then the Income Tax Department and Esso (M) Bhd before joining Lim Goh Tong, a well-known Chinese businessman, as general manager of the then fledgling Genting Highlands which is now an internationally known casino-equipped holiday resort
The last of the trio, Kee Yoon Wee, was also arrested, charged, convicted and jailed for criminal breach of trust in 1987. Prior to that, Kee, a Melbourne graduate of civil engineering, contested in the 1982 general elections under BN/MCA ticket but lost to an ISA detainee, the late Chan Kok Kit from DAP.
He was then appointed as a senator and later the deputy trade and industry minister in 1984.
Return of the ideology?
In the 1984/85 MCA power struggle, the now controversial president, Ling was aligned with Wang, Tan and Kee, and all of them were expelled by acting president Neo Yee Pan but later re-instated after a judicial intervention.
Neo and his dominant faction were then overthrown by the rebels led by Tan Koon Swan, including Ling who succeeded Tan as MCA president after the latter was convicted and jailed.
What are Ling's reasons or motives of re-instating his former factional comrades-in-arms? Could it be loneliness or perhaps nostalgia in the fast-changing political landscape of today? Or is he frightened by the rise and political awakening of the youth in the politics of reformasi?
Or is it not a more well-planned and concerted effort on the part of Ling's faction to reassert the ideology of Tan Koon Swan in the late 70s and early 80s which is that MCA must fuse all political, economic, financial, media, information and educational means at its disposal under one united party for it to ultimately become the Leviathan of the Chinese Malaysian community?
JAMES WONG WING ON is chief analyst of Strategic Analysis Malaysia which produces the subscriber-based political report, Analysis Malaysia. Wong is a former member of parliament (1990-1995) and a former columnist for the Sin Chew Jit Poh Chinese daily. He read political science and economics at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While in Sin Chew , he and a team of journalists won the top awards of Malaysian Press Institute for 1998 and 1999.
