Did you know that while you were taking a one-hour afternoon nap last year, according to an analysis recently, MCA was a busy bee hovering over small towns and big cities in the country and would have recruited an average of 15 members by the time you were roused from your sleep?

In other words, the second-largest party in the country signed up an average of one member every four minutes, reaching 378 new members a day throughout the entire 2001.

This observation was made by Yong Sun Yong, previously a columnist for several Chinese dailies, based on the party's announcement that it had recruited 138,000 members in the past year.

"At the rate things are going 10 years to come, MCA will easily have more than two million members," he wrote in article which appeared in last month's Perspektif Pedas , a Mandarin news monthly.

MCA reportedly started with 133,722 members at its inception in 1949 and now has 1.04 million members.

However, Yong noted the "irregular growth pattern" in MCA membership had occurred in the past, particularly in year 1998.

"Apart from the aggressive recruitment campaign, the party elections (which were held subsequently in 1999) could have been another reason for that," said the columnist who had stopped contributing to Chinese dailies shortly after Nanyang Siang Pau and China Press were taken over by MCA last May.

He reproduced in his article, statistics showing MCA membership growth from 1988 to 1998 that were adapted from two party bulletins, published in conjunction with the party's 45th and 50th anniversary respectively.

The 45th anniversary bulletin recorded the increase from 1988 to 1993 while the second bulletin jotted the increase from 1988 to 1998.

Total members (45th anniversary bulletin) Increase Total members (50th anniversary bulletin) Increase
1988 488,743 N.A. 478,489 N.A.
1989 518,260 29,517 495,357 16,868
1990 518,920 660 518,226 22,869
1991 533,788 14,868 531,619 13,393
1992 575,216 41,428 548,524 16,905
1993 598,302 23,086 589,957 41,433
1994 N.A. N.A. 606,609 16,652
1995 N.A. N.A. 638,763 32,154
1996 N.A. N.A. 693,935 55,172
1997 N.A. N.A. 714,779 20,844
1998 N.A. N.A. 811,738 96,959
Highest 41,428(1992) 96,959(1998)
Lowest 660(1990) 13,393(1991)
Average 21,912 33,325

Yong pointed out that though there were "discrepancies" between the two sets of data from the bulletins, such as the figures for 1998, the cause of the discrepancies was not explained.

He went on to say that if the 52-year-old MCA has over one million members as it claimed, around 16 percent of the Chinese population in the country should be party members.

Chinese Malaysians constitute some 30 percent of the country's 22.8 million population.

Votes for MCA

What further raised the eyebrow was that MCA had slightly more than 800,000 members in 1998 and gained a total of 936,239 votes for all parliamentary seats it contested for in the 1999 general elections.

"On one hand, if we assume that all party members voted for MCA, that would mean only 124,501 votes came from non-MCA members of the ethnic Chinese.

"But on the other hand, if we assume that there were more than 124,501 votes from the non-MCA Chinese, then how many of the party members actually did not vote for the party?" questioned Yong.