So what do the Chinese really want?

A former political colleague from Penang used to tell me that all a Chinese could ever want in life is to become a towkay (businessman).

There seems to be a grain of truth in his cynical observation. With the entire political system tilted against them, and with little land for agricultural purposes, most Chinese make their living without any hope of government assistance, in the world of private enterprise. There, despite the quota system, their ruthless ingenuity and incredible hard work have ensured their survival.

A few years ago, both Lee Teng Hui of Taiwan and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore attributed the success story of the Chinese people in South East Asia to their Confucian traditions. The same idea was bounced around in Kuala Lumpur recently, when hundreds of the most successful Chinese businessmen from all over the world gathered here to share their experience and celebrate their common prosperity.

There is no doubt that the Chinese diaspora had been lucky to have brought their Confucian teaching with them wherever they were scattered. You could say that Confucianism is the closest thing to a religion that the Chinese will ever have.

In the early years of their settlement in Malaysia and elsewhere, their common cultural legacy bonded them into tightly-knit communities, in which they could expect mutual assistance for their individual and collective survival. Confucius' teaching on the supreme importance of family obligations, and his ethical emphasis on moderation in all things (the Doctrine of the Golden Mean), must have been instrumental in forging harmonious social relations among the early Chinese.

The early Chinese migrants were either illiterate or semi-literate. (My father was a teacher in China, and so was hugely respected by the local Chinese when he moved to Kuching before the War.) They might have been lost to gambling, opium smoking and clannish underworld activities in an alien hostile land, if not for Confucius' imperative on education.