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Continental Hotel, Colombo, on May 26, 2005 By former Prime
Minister of Malaysia
Dr. Tun Mahathir Ben Mohamed
“Beyond Existing Frontiers”
The Hon. Anura Bandaranaike M.P, Minister of Industry,Tourism & Investment
Promotion, the Hon,. Minister of Finance, Mr Saliya Wickramasuriya, Mr
Keith Perera, Hon. Ministers, Ladies & Gentlemen,
Thank you very much for the kind remarks about my person. I have been
asked to talk about “Beyond Existing Frontiers”. Now I would not really
know about the frontiers of Sri Lanka but I am much more familiar with the
frontiers of Malaysia. Actually, Malaysia started off as a nation and
their people with an inferiority complex. We were under colonial rule or
under foreign influence or hegemony for 450 years. The Portuguese
conquered Malaca in 1511 and after the Portuguese came, the Dutch and then
the British and throughout this period we sanked lower and lower in our own
estimation. We believe that there was nothing we could do. We believed
that only the Europeans could rule our country, that we have no capacity
to rule our own country far less to developing and we gained independence
in 1957, this mind-set was still there that we would not be able to achieve
what the former colonial masters had achieved. We could not better them but
the first leaders of Malaysia Tuk Raman Razak, they felt that in order to
justify our demand for independence we must give the people something that
we can be proud of. We must demonstrate the independents government must
demonstrate to the people that we can do better than the colonial masters.
That was easy to say but is not easy to convince people that they can do
better than their former Colonial Masters and so we set out to convince
them, we set out to reassure them that they can do what others can do and
probably do better than the others. For a long time we looked at Europe
as a motto. Now Europe has been developed over a long period of time.
Their early days of development was 200 years over 200 years old. 200
years ago they began their development towards a developed country status.
They have forgotten the difficulties that they faced. We could not learn
much from them simply because they keep on saying ‘why can’t you do this,
why can’t you do this the way we do. They have forgotten how difficult it
was for them to reach their present state and so we decided not to look
only at Europe but to look East. Because in the East after the second
world war we see a number of countries which have literally pooled
themselves up by their good strengths. They have been able to develop
their country, to acquire technology and industrial capacities that over a
short period of time exceeded those of Europe and these countries were
Japan and South Korea. Japan grew by libs and bounds after the destruction
of their country during world war two including two atom bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Korea on the other hand, was occupied by the
Japanese for a long period of time and the peoples’ confidence in
themselves was also destroyed. Yet, we see first Japan recovering and
beating actually the skills and the technologies of the European countries
and of America. Very quickly Japan became the second biggest economic
power in the world
At first of course there was a lot of doubt about Japanese products because
before the war Japanese products were regarded as very inferior, very cheap
but very inferior and not long lasting. But after the war the Japanese
adopted a different approach towards their industries. They were
determined to produce products which are better and best in the world. I
remember reading about the first Japanese cars which were exported to
America. The Americans insisted that before they could sell Japanese cars
in America they must set up numerous service stations and repair stations,
repair work shops because the Americans were convinced that Japanese cars
would break-down every now and again but then suddenly the Americans
realized that those workshops were no use at all because of the high
quality of Japanese cars. After that Japanese cars and Japanese products
began to be accepted as not only good products but bench marking world
class. Then came the Koreans and indeed Time Magazine once again were
alarmed, when he reported ‘here comes the Koreans’. Again they see a new
country in the east being able to acquire the skills, the technology and
the knowledge of the advanced countries of the west and to master them to
the point where they could compete with the European countries and with
America. Today we know how far they have developed. Today they are no
longer people who copy the technologies of the west, they are actually
people who innovate and invent new products based on their own
understanding of modern technology. Today it is common for us to use NTT
telephones or to use Samsung telephones names which before were unknown and
of course there are many other products which come out of Japan and come
out of Korea which are accepted as world standard. Why have Japan and
Korea achieved this. It is because they took to challenge to challenge
their own perception, their own estimation of things. They think they
decided that they could do what others could do and they set out to learn,
to acquire technology, to improve on them and over time, they succeeded.
Now this is what we learn from Japan and Korea. Under a policy which will
call look East we have been looking west for a long time, we decided to
look east. To see Japan and Korea and even Taiwan and what we learn from
them is that if you really apply yourselves seriously to doing anything you
can master it as the Japanese and the Koreans mastered all the skills of
the West. Once we realize that we too can learn we too can adopt their
approach one can say almost that half the battle was won. So Malaysia
decided to look east to learn from the Japanese not so much the technology
of the Japanese but the work ethics of the Japanese which is far more
important than anything else. The work ethics of the Japanese, the work
ethics of the Koreans they really work, apply themselves diligently to
whatever that they are doing and they work very hard. You know that if you
do anything repeatedly, invariably you develop skills, invariably you
master the skills and eventually you would improve on the skills. So we
decided that our people should learn assiduously, diligently how to do
things. Now Malaysia when it became independent had lot of unemployment.
Our problem was to create jobs for our people. Now if we continue with
agriculture we will find not enough jobs being created because on an acre
of land you can only support one farmer or even less but on one acre of
land devoted to industry you can create employment for 500 people. For
that reason initially, and for that reason only we decided that the best
way to solve our employment problem was to industrialize. But we knew
nothing about the industry, we had no technology, we had no capital, we had
no management-know-how and we did not know the market so how do we
industrialize. At a time when newly independent countries were
nationalizing foreign holdings we went in the opposite direction. We
decided to invite more foreigners to our country to set up new industries
particularly, labour intensive industries because our intention was not to
make money for the government, not to collect taxes but instead to get them
to come in to start industries which will employ our unemployed people and
this policy was so successful that eventually Malaysians had full
employment and had actually to bring in foreign workers. Now what that
thought asked was, is it possible for the sons and daughters of farmers to
learn how to work in assembling plants to do intricate work. to be able to
assemble very mining circuits and the like. Obviously our people can do
the work that was thought impossible for them that the sons of farmers and
fishermen, the daughters of farmers and fishermen could actually
manufacture world class products. Now once we realize that the next thing
of course was to decide that we should truly industrialize not because we
need jobs anymore because all our people were already employed but we
wanted to industrialize in order to add more value to our products and to
earn more foreign exchange. This of course would and reach our people
earning foreign exchange is one way of and reaching our people. We were a
small country, our market is far too small, we have to choose the world as
our market and remarkably we succeeded. Today for example, Malaysia’s
trade is two times the size of its GDP. Now I will be taking into
consideration Japan whose trade is huge but still constitutes less than 20%
of its GDP. You will understand how trade dependent Malaysia has become
because it’s economy is based on trade under export and import of goods and
the trade has now reached almost 200 Bn. US$ a year. This has enabled us
to move forward but we still need to overcome some league of confidence in
our people so we urge them, we encourage them to undertake dangerous and
challenging. tasks. We encourage Malaysians to do what most people would
not do. From a tropical country we encourage them to climb on Everest.
Not many people would climb on Everest come from the tropics usually come
from the temp. countries. Malaysia has got no snow, the lowest temperature
is 20 degree centigrades but they learn how to climatize themselves to the
snows of Mount Everest. They drop by parachute over the North Pole, they
sail one man sail alone around the world, one man swam across the English
channel and a lady decided to ski 1,100 km from the South Pole to one of
the stations in the South Pole. This shows that if you want to do
something it can be done but you must put your heart and soul into it so
now we have lastly overcome our league of confidence, our inferiority
complex and with this confidence we are able to challenge to break the
envelopes of this speech. The glass ceiling has been broken many many
times because we now have confidence. So if we want to go beyond existing
frontiers, I am sure you will appreciate the need to be willing to
challenge things, to tell yourself that you can do what you thought before
as impossible. With that idea, with that feeling, that confidence
Malaysia has prospered greatly. It is all due to hard work and
incidentally if I may say so, it is also due to the political stability of
Malaysia. Now this is not so easily achieved because in Malaysia we have
three different races. We have the Muslim Malays, the Hindu Indians and
the Buddhist Chinese. They speak different languages, they have different
cultures, they have different value systems and economically they are not
evenly developed. To get these three races to work together, to live in
relative harmony and to contribute towards the stability of the country,
was something of our challenge for us. But, we are fortunate because the
leaders the first founding fathers of Malaysia set the pattern of
inter-racial co-operation together they had asked for independence from the
British so that the British could not use their excuse that if Malaysia
became independent then the Malays would oppress the Chinese and the
Indians and that attitude of inter-racial co-operation has persisted
excepting for 1969 when there were race riots and more than a 100 people
died, many shops were burnt, vehicles burnt etc but we learnt, we learnt
from that incident that the race riots was due to economic disparities
between the races and so we launched a new economic policy and affirmative
action policy to equalize or to reduce the disparities in the economic
wealth of the different races. Initially, all the shops in the towns and
the buildings in the towns belonging to the Chinese, so in 1969 when there
were riots the Malays went into the towns and started burning the buildings
and the vehicles there, knowing that they belonging to the Chinese but the
new Economic Policies has enabled the Malays and the Indians to have
valuable buildings in the towns and to own vehicles including luxury
vehicles. Today if there are race riots and the Malays go into the towns
to burn the buildings or to burn the vehicles, they may be burning vehicles
belonging to their own race. So, that is a deterrent against their running
amok in the towns. But then of course there are very many things that we
have to do in order to break through the barriers, the barriers the mental
barriers and the other barriers which were erected during the colonial
days. Today most of the barriers are down. Today our barriers are outside
the country. Now we have to face challenges from abroad. We have to
understand what globalization is about and we have to formulate strategies
in order to overcome the challenges. Countries which have the same
background I believe, can work together so that we can prosper together
because one of the slogans that we have adopted in Malaysia is to prosper
thy neighbour not beggar thy neighbour but to prosper thy neighbour because
we have found that when neighbours face a lot of trouble invariably the
trouble spills over into our country. This happened when Vietnam was
facing a lot of problems after the defeat of the Americans, a lot of their
people ran away and their stop over was Malaysia. Many were resettled in
third countries but some would not be accepted by any country. Some 10,000
of them were not acceptable to any country, we could not find jobs for
them, we could not send them back so what we did was to work with Vietnam
in order to prosper it and today because Vietnam is one of the fastest
growing country in South East Asia and is relatively prosperous, all those
refugees who had stopped over in Malaysia have now returned to Vietnam It
is quite clear that when you prosper your neighbour you solve your
problem and beyond that because Vietnam is prosperous it is now a good
market for the products of Malaysia, so prospering your neighbour is a good
policy and I hope that this kind of understanding will also develop within
Sri Lanka, a friend of many centuries and Malaysia. We have very many
things in common and quite a few Sri Lankans live in Malaysia, they are
Malaysians now of course, and I think if we decide to work together closely
we can really go beyond Existing Frontiers.
I thank you
