The expected massive swing of Chinese voters to the opposition and the unexpected results at the March 8 general election must have left many thoughtful Chinese citizens in Malaysia to wonder: where would the Chinese in this country go from here?

This question must have plucked at the heartstrings of those active leaders and members of the Chinese and Chinese-based component parties of the Barisan Nasional in Peninsular Malaysia, namely MCA and Gerakan. After the shock and trauma have subsided, they must have been left demoralised and devastated. The political formula of power sharing among the various ethic communities represented by the BN parties that has worked so well for half a century has evaporated overnight.

In their painful reflection, some of them must have realised that the country has changed. If their parties do not change with the time, they will become irrelevant. Certainly, Gerakan is almost on the brink of extinction, with only two MPs in the Dewan Rakyat, and their party candidates completely wiped out in their power base in Penang.

In the aftermath of their debacle at the March poll, we hear calls from within MCA for some kind of reform. Obviously, the idea of participating in BN with a view of fighting for Chinese rights within the ruling coalition has proven to be futile, as political turmoil in recent decades has produced rapid and dramatic deterioration of the Chinese' rights in all aspects of national life.

Paid too heavy a price

For this, and for their election defeat, leaders of MCA and Gerakan have openly blamed Umno in the Chinese vernacular press. They have paid too heavy a price at the poll for the arrogant racial and religious posturing of Umno leaders, as well as Umno's cynical one-party hegemonic dominance of the ruling coalition. Umno has made them irrelevant, by squeezing them out of the important posts in the cabinet, and all other important spheres of public life.

Umno must change, they say, for MCA and Gerakan to survive in future polls. There must be political reform in the country, or the Chinese will be even more disillusioned with the BN.

Now, nearly six months after the general election, we have an opportunity to take stock of the situation, and assess the fate of the Chinese people in Malaysia.

Umno has not changed much in alienating the Malays and the non-Malays alike. The reforms to our diseased moribund institutions like the judiciary, the police, the ACA, the media, and the universities, as promised by the PM after the elections, have been nothing more than piecemeal and superficial. In fact, the PM's popularity in opinion polls has dipped further.

anwar and pak lah and dna testing Confronted with fierce attack from PKR icon Anwar Ibrahim, and faced with stiff competition from the Pakatan Rakyat governments in five states, Umno's response is to dig deeper into its Malay nationalist roots. An old leopard can never change its skin.

There is another reason for this. This is the year for Umno elections. With Pak Lah on the way out, there are huge pockets of vacuum within the party hierarchy screaming to be filled. This is the time for Umno big wigs, especially those in important government positions, to rally support by displaying strength in defending the rights and dominance of the Malay race. To make concession to the MCA and Gerakan, or to initiate political reform, would be seen as weak.

Along this course of nationalist sabre-rattling, came the disclosure of secret talks between Umno and PAS at the very highest levels. This Umno initiative may have plunged PAS into a certain degree of internal disarray, and created some confusion within the rank and file of Pakatan Rakyat, But Umno has also paid the price of alienating further their Chinese allies within Barisan Nasional.

Just last week, the Gerakan Wanita Chief and the deputy information minister publicly suggested that Gerakan should get out of BN, claiming that she was voicing the concern of her party grassroots. The secret talks between Umno and PAS, she claimed, was the last straw on the back of the Gerakan camel.

toh kin woon 101007 smiling The next day, one of the most credible Gerakan top leaders in Penang, Dr Toh Kin Woon, announced his resignation from the party, citing disagreement with the party policy stand as his reason. Dr Toh has for a long time voiced his dissenting opinion on many major controversies in the past. He has been widely respected for being the conscience, not only of Gerakan, but of the entire BN. His departure is obviously a vote of no confidence in the mythical "social contract" that formed the bedrock of the reason-to-be of the ruling coalition.

These two events happened just days after nomination in the Permatang Pauh by-election. Toh has since been seen at PKR campaign activities. In fact, he has publicly declared his support for the multi-racialism of the party, though he has refrained from joining PKR, citing for his reason his intention to concentrat on research work.

Big question mark

Meanwhile, there has been a wave of mass defection of MCA members to the DAP and the PKR in the past few months in the Klang Valley. The most notable MCA defector has been Dr Tan Yee Kew, the former Klang MP and a distinguished MCA Wanita leader. She has opted for the PKR, bringing with her thousands of MCA supporters from Selangor.

tan yee kew quit mca pc 170708 group When leaving the MCA, Dr Tan also expressed her disillusionment with the internal squabble within the MCA. We see the same squabble splashing across pages and pages of the Chinese dailies everyday, as they report the intense fight for positions in the forthcoming party election. Political unknowns and hilarious wannabes make headlines everyday.

There, it is all about personalities, and no constructive programmes for the reconstruction and rejuvenation of MCA has been offered. Though the candidate for the party president, Ong Tee Kiat, is widely respected among the Chinese community, what he can do with a party stuck in the quagmire of personal interest and internal conflict is a big question mark.

In short, like Umno, MCA is trapped in the old mould of communal politics. Unlike Gerakan though, MCA has a massive machinery in the form of very strong local community organisations as well as several positions in the cabinet. This party seem poised to survive a little longer than Gerakan within the BN.

So where would the Chinese go from here?

With their low birth rate and continuing migration overseas, the Chinese population would dwindle further in relation to the total population of Malaysia in the decades to come. We are looking at 15% within the next 20 or 30 years. The politics of race is the politics of counting heads. With Chinese votes split among so many political parties, the political chips of the Chinese community seem vastly diminished. Chinese unity is no longer a viable option.

Perhaps the question of where the Chinese should go from here is flawed. It is still mired in the old parameters of a zero-sum game of setting one race against another. The post March 8 political equation has subverted the old balance of power between the ethnic groups.

Inter-ethic relation has also become much more complex with the emergence of Pakatan Rakyat as a possible alternative government. The grand narrative of communal politics still lives in the hearts of many Malaysians of all races, but there are an increasing number of small narratives struggling to take their place in the war of public discourse. The way of telling the Malaysian story has been vastly diversified.

By way of a conclusion, I have a few observations to make.

For those Chinese who still subscribe to a kind of exclusivist Greater Hun cultural nationalism, time would prove this road to be a lonely political cul-de-sac. This applies equally to the MCA and the DAP. The future of the Chinese community in the context of a Malaysian federation lies in building linkages across racial lines. For instance, the well being of the Malaysian Chinese is inextricably dependent on the political choice of the native people of Sarawak and Sabah, for whom they have given little thought in the past - and in the present.

Then again, the people of an ethic minority do not necessarily have to lose out in the political process, if the political process can be made more democratic. The Jews in the United States are a very small minority in that country, but they enjoy prosperity and influence far out of proportion with their numbers.

As democracy evolves through a painful and torturous route in Malaysia, the tendency will be for voting trends to be increasingly motivated by individual and family needs, rather than communal needs. The old assumptions of the so-called "social contract" may have been necessary and effective to a certain extent in the past half century, but changing political forces will introduce new elements in Malaysian political culture, so that the politics of race will not be able to enjoy monopoly in political conversations.

What Umno does not seem to realise, is that the crisis for MCA and Gerakan is also a crisis for Umno and the Barisan Nasional. That is bad news for BN supporters and good news for democracy.