Timber, tycoons and the making of Sarawak politics

In this long-awaited book, Ngu Ik Tien, a senior lecturer in Chinese Studies at Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, offers a cogent and compelling account of politics in a Malaysian state with a political history like none other: Sarawak.

The account complements a mere handful of book-length studies of the state’s politics—most notably James Ung-Ho Chin’s 1996 Chinese Politics in Sarawak: A Study of the Sarawak United People’s Party and Faisal S. Hazis’s 2012 Domination and Contestation: Muslim Bumiputera Politics in Sarawak (like Ngu’s volume, both began their lives as PhD dissertations)—and a still-sparse number of (generally older) works of (now, if not initially) history, anthropology, or economics (e.g. by Daniel Chew, James C. Jackson, Amarjit Kaur, Craig Lockard, Michael Leigh, Peter Searle, T’ien Ju-K’ang).

Particularly as federal “Malayan” parties woo Sarawak’s (and neighbouring Sabah’s) parliamentary seats increasingly aggressively to cement potential winning coalitions, why and how politics in this state differ from peninsular norms is all the more imperative for Malaysians and Malaysia-watchers to understand.

Like Faisal, in his study of Sarawak’s also-complex Malay/Melanau politics, Ngu frames her analysis in terms of Joel Migdal’s “state in society” approach, albeit proposing also a novel take on revamped consociationalism in Malaysia. At its most basic, Migdal’s take is that state and social forces cannot be disentangled fully; the latter both contest and share authority with the state, including in the functioning of personalised and/or partisan political machines. The state is embedded in society, not least via the participation of local strongmen across society, parties, and government. Moreover, disaggregating federal, state, and local tiers of government reveals how each is “intertwined with society”, which itself consists of “aggregated segments” (p. 4–5).

Ngu’s lens is one of political economy, as well: the story of the rise and transformation of a dominant political model in Sarawak is also the story not just of postcolonial development (though it is that, as well), but of the particular economic path the state has taken. Indeed, the state’s experience offers a fascinating lens on the role of primary products in Malaysia’s integration more broadly into global markets and patronage-based politics alike (though beyond Ngu’s own focus).

To build her case, Ngu brings together meticulous research, drawing on primary and secondary sources in English, Chinese, and Malay, with extensive, iterative field research from 2010–2022. (The press has unfortunately opted for chapter-by-chapter reference lists, rather than one compiled bibliography for the book—useful, no doubt, for readers downloading a specific chapter, but rather frustrating otherwise.) Ngu’s own identity—and the experience she gained growing up in Sibu—presumably lent credibility in building the trust required for some seemingly quite frank interviews. (A brief note on methods appears on p24.) Adding useful depth throughout are illustrative case studies: for instance, of local timber companies’ emergence, integration into global business networks, and political rise in chapter 2; of politicians with changing leadership profiles in chapter 3; and of Sarawak Chinese associations in chapter 5. The text is clearly presented and largely readily accessible even for readers without significant Malaysia expertise.

Notwithstanding the more modest “1945–2018” claim in the book’s title, in practice, Ngu traces patterns of socioeconomic and political development in Sarawak from the mid-19th century, when the British James Brooke first established his dynastic raj on land the sultan of Brunei granted as thanks for helping to crush a rebellion, through state elections in 2021. (One with even passing familiarity with Sarawak will note the continuity in family and firm names at the centre of the state’s politics and economy, from the mid-20th century until today.)

Along the way came then-Raja Charles Vyner Brooke’s postwar cession of Sarawak to Great Britain as a colony, independence as part of a new Federation of Malaysia in 1963, resource booms and slowdowns, social restructuring, and swings of political fortune. If ethnoreligious divisions, and Malay–Muslim dominance specifically, comprise the throughline to peninsular Malaysian politics, however overlaid with socioeconomic class, they are one of several in Sarawak—and with a very different valence, not least given unique legacies of monarchical rule. And yet the story Ngu traces for Sarawak, and especially Chinese-majority Sibu, offers important takeaways for Malaysian politics as a whole, especially in her focus on “informal politics”, careful accounting for how money matters to partisan patterns, and disentangling of both ethnic and religious subcategories and modes of political engagement.

Readings of Malaysian politics have long highlighted its “consociational” aspects, however far the polity has strayed in practice from Arend Lijphart’s specifications, with increasing Malay dominance. Ethnicity has also been a centrally important organising principle in Sarawak politics. However, here Malays and other Muslim Bumiputera have never been so numerically or otherwise dominant, nor has a tidy Malay–Chinese–Indian trichotomy captured the local demographic mix.

Not least given Malaysia’s heavily centralised federal structure, analyses of the country’s politics tend, too, to have a pronounced whole-nation, central-government slant, glossing over subnational differences. The sustained fracturing of Barisan Nasional (National Front, BN) dominance at the state level since 2008 has heightened awareness of the political distinctions across states, yet academic research has yet really to catch up (apart from the occasional PhD thesis or, for instance, a series of astute of-the-moment subnational studies from Singapore’s ISEAS).

Ngu homes in on several key, and distinguishing, features of Sarawak’s political landscape. First is the role of extractable resources, especially timber, in creating and sustaining a cohort of wealth-propelled politicians. Sarawak’s government essentially set the course for the state’s development at the turn of the 19th century, when Charles Brooke brought in a cohort of Foochow (Fujianese) Methodist agriculturalists, hoping to jumpstart rice production. They turned instead largely to rubber, then timber, becoming the “most economically powerful dialect group in Sarawak” (p20) by the 1970s. Sarawak’s timber trade thrived especially in the postwar years, not least in Sibu and the wider Rejang River region. The British created a market structure; local entrepreneurs subcontracted the work for, then inherited and expanded, those trade channels, through shifts in demand and supply alike.

“Timber tycoons”, largely Foochow and from the Rejang basin, emerged under British rule; state institutions and businessmen (a gendered category) were then mutually constitutive. “Local strongmen” became the crux of the machinery for the Sarawak United Peoples’ Party (SUPP), the state’s first political party, launched in 1959. That said, initially, the rank-and-file of SUPP were leftist intellectuals (including “underground communists”) and the working class, even as conservative, British-friendly business elites filled the upper ranks. Repression of the (especially communist) left in the 1950–60s—a shared effort by British and postcolonial leaders, including wealthy towkays/strongmen—shifted that balance.

Timber entrepreneurs gained increasing political influence as their business clout also grew, notwithstanding rivalries within this segment. Helping their rise was the declining pull of traditional communal leaders as both access to education—including in Mandarin, weakening dialect ties—and the franchise expanded. (With land and its resources being under state-level jurisdiction in Malaysia, varying ties with one or another [Muslim Bumiputera] chief minister also loom in the background as factors in who could pursue timber or other land-based wealth and, hence, whose political path was cleared.) SUPP then joined the Sarawak Alliance, precursor to the Sarawak Barisan Nasional (SBN), in 1970. Replicating the peninsular model with this coalition repositioned SUPP’s struggle from a premise of “class-based mass mobilization” to increasingly “(Chinese) communal politics” (p62, emphasis in original)—although SUPP had intended to be multiracial. Its Dayak support dwindled at that point.

Alongside ethnic power-sharing, “developmentalism” became a core part of the appeal of the SBN. Developmentalism entailed a combination of “private donations” for increasingly normalised vote-buying and public resources for selective patronage to woo votes—even as Sarawak remained conspicuously under-developed, compared with other Malaysian states. The accounts of other scholars (for instance, Andrew Aeria, on whose work Ngu draws) complement effectively this part of Ngu’s account; she offers less detail on specific projects and the like.

But particularly intriguing in this vein is her discussion of election betting as a “smokescreen for electoral manipulation” (pp90–91). The fact of increasing reliance on vote-buying by the late 1990s, especially in rural areas, Ngu suggests, indicated the extent to which “non-material patron–client relationships were weakening” (p92), as resource-fuelled money politics grew increasingly entrenched. Meanwhile, whereas gossip and rumour have always supplemented mainstream media, these ramped up with the advent of mobile phones, then especially the internet in the late 1990s. Such channels have helped citizens “to make sense of the informal political landscape”, including regarding promised projects’ implementation (pp95–96).

The second, overlapping factor that stands out in Ngu’s analysis is the role of Chinese subgroups, even if dialect allegiances are losing their pull. It is at this level that the role of informal politics is most apparent, clarifying Ngu’s Migdalian lens. Most urban areas of Sarawak have a Chinese majority, though the community constitutes only about one-fourth of the state’s total population now (similar to the proportion in peninsular Malaysia), slightly outnumbering Malays; Iban are the largest category (approximately 30%).

Uniquely among Malaysian states, about half Sarawak’s population is Christian, aligned with varying denominations but spanning non-Malay ethnic groups; just over one-third are Muslim. About two-thirds of Chinese Sarawakians are Foochow or Hakka. That sub-ethnic distinction is especially important to understanding Sarawak politics. (Cognate subdivisions differentiate Iban and Malays from different communities, as well, with regional and socioeconomic divisions reverberating through political stances.) A Hokkien merchant class had already ceded economic dominance to entrepreneurial rural farmers of the Rejang delta by the time Foochow timber merchants and financiers—establishment of the first Foochow bank in Sarawak in 1952 helped catalyse “rural entrepreneurs into urban businessmen” (p41) as the timber trade gained steam—really seized Chinese political leadership in the 1980s–90s.

As a predominantly Chinese party, active statewide, SUPP readily exploits the threat of Chinese marginalisation within the ruling coalition in Sarawak or nationally to rally support. Yet the real drama has historically been at a lower level of aggregation: communal leaders represent especially particular dialect groups, the relative prevalence of which varies across the state. (It is not quite clear in this account the extent to which “ethnicized patron–client ties” for a given party leader have extended beyond, say, Foochow constituents to other Chinese Sarawakians, however.)

More broadly, both huatuan, a catchall term for Chinese associations (for commerce, education, welfare, etc.) and Christian churches and Taoist temples have been important sociopolitical actors, even when eschewing overt partisan affiliation. Initially, it was the church—among the Foochow, especially the Methodist Church—that supplied community leadership. But today’s system of ethnic communal leaders dates back to the late 19th century: the Brookes worked with and through Chinese towkays who merged economic power with kinship- and dialect-group–based legitimacy.

Communal leadership—”effectively the semi-government for the Chinese” (p103)—rested with huatuan in the colonial period before shifting to parties, then returned again to huatuan, especially on cultural and economic issues, with new challenges in the 1970s–80s. Leadership of huatuan, though, has changed, along with the organisations’ reliability as SUPP (or Democratic Action Party, DAP) vote blocs (a secular shift affecting the DAP and the Malaysian Chinese Association on the peninsula, as well). “SUPP timber tycoons” dominated Sibu’s huatuan until the waning days of the SBN; at that point, aligning with earlier shifts in federal-level associations, leaders of small-and-medium enterprises rose, instead. Nonetheless, since the early 2000s, conservative huatuan have lost clout as effective champions. Other NGOs—for instance, advocating for environmentalism, contra the timber trade—have come increasingly to the fore, instead.

Christian churches, meanwhile, have been tugged increasingly toward politics, even if mainstream leadership remained pro-SBN and inclined toward closed-door negotiations. The rise of more activist-inclined independent churches and new patterns Malaysia-wide has shifted that balance. Especially fraught has been how to respond to state-led Islamisation initiatives, not least related to questions of religious language and the Christian bibles used in Sarawak. The rise of Parti Islam seMalaysia, including as part of broad coalitions, since the late 1990s has complicated local calculations, but the national-level DAP in particular has “turned Christianity to its advantage” (p136) in building rapport in Sarawak since the 2010s.

Third, we see politics clearly here as a multi-level game: federal, state, and district/municipal interests and strategies interact. It is in terms of this dimension that Ngu posits a new approach to consociationalism, as savvy incumbent leaders reframe their claims and cause in regional terms, pursuing a revised political settlement. The Malaysian federal government has pursued a more aggressively pro-Malay/Muslim Bumiputera policy in both peninsular and East Malaysia since the 1980s; such an approach rankles in demographically different Sarawak. There, relying on Chinese support, successive chief ministers could use the threat of a federal model to coax SUPP votes.

That said, rapid urbanisation starting in the 1970s–80s reshaped the population; a substantial majority of ethnic Chinese in particular are now in Sarawak’s cities. There, political patterns have varied all the more: factions from Kuching, Miri, and Sibu sparred in SUPP, reflecting both political-economic differences and sub-ethnic patterns (Foochow dominate only in Sibu). But also, it is among urban voters that the DAP gained a foothold, first championing Chinese cultural, language, and education rights, and then advocating for “democracy” and against corruption.

The combination of ethnic politics and developmentalism lost its power to bolster the SBN post-2018, amid churning national concern over corruption and abuse of power. State leaders turned instead to echoing and amplifying percolating “Autonomous Sarawak” or “Sarawak for Sarawakians” (S4S) messages. The latter slogan emerged in 1978, via the Miri-based opposition Sarawak People’s Organisation. Through the end of the 20th century, however, only the peninsula-based DAP really made headway as an opposition party (and that work was slow-going even after its initial breakthrough in 1982).

But as the BN nationally haemorrhaged support amid the 1MDB saga from 2013 on, the SBN increasingly distanced itself with a narrative of regionalism, stressing a non-ethnic, collective state identity. When the BN lost at the federal level in 2018, SBN “cut itself loose from federal oversight” (p176) to organise as Gabungan Parti Sarawak (GPS), angling for federal concessions in exchange for support. At the same time, the share of tycoon politicians diminished—and really just two families and their firms (the Tiongs and Rimbunan Hijau, and the Laus and KTS) have held sway, regardless, since 2004. With a decline in the “personality-based patronage system” and in developmentalist ideology as a winning strategy, a “discursive, rather than merely material” emphasis on Sarawak regionalism gained traction (p141)—albeit articulated differently in state versus federal elections.

Ngu parses electoral patterns in Sarawak since 2011 to clarify that multi-level calculus: any would-be federal government cannot count on Sarawak as a “fixed deposit” (that is, reliable vote bloc); even separatism, and certainly autonomy or states’ rights, is within the discursive pale; and SUPP’s fortunes and coherence as a party have waned, but the DAP cannot count on benefiting (especially in state elections), because “ethnically inclusive yet regionally exclusive rhetoric” (p169, emphasis in original) have increasingly shaped the state’s political posture. One might quibble with whether GPS’s “positing regionalism as the basis of consociational government” (p185) in place of ethnicity really works—the parties branded in Sarawak as “Malayan” neither see nor position themselves as representing only peninsular interests. Regardless, that framing is still helpful for understanding Sarawak’s (and Sabah’s) claim to equal partnership with peninsular Malaya rather than accepting being merely one of thirteen states.

All told, Ngu’s work offers a unique and provocative lens on Sarawak politics. As elections approach anew, both Sarawak state and federal, it is tempting to assume this text might reveal the next step in the sequence. Indeed, I rather wish Ngu had been able to extend her analysis just a bit further toward the present-day! Yet while patterns are apparent, what comes through most clearly is the extent to which outcomes are less so in Malaysia’s multi-dimensional political jigsaw puzzle—the reality that even ostensibly “path-dependent” outcomes may branch.

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