The Fifth Hakka Republic- A Fifth Coloumn On the Run

The recent state election in Sabah has prompted a flurry of interpretations, many of them contradictory and most of them superficial. Yet the deeper pattern is neither new nor unique to Sabah. Electoral outcomes across Malaysia , whether in Johor, Selangor, Penang, Kedah, Kelantan or Perlis, have always been shaped less by grand ideological tides than by the cumulative impression left by individual candidates and the coalitions that back them. Local grievances, personal credibility, campaign discipline and the raw visibility of party machinery matter far more than any imported narrative about “reform” or “regime change.”

What is distinctive in the present cycle, however, is the growing public awareness of a phenomenon that has been quietly gathering force for two decades: the steady, almost capillary penetration of ethnic-Chinese political and economic influence into every sphere of Malaysian life, both at federal and state levels. This is not the crude “Chinese takeover” caricature peddled in certain quarters, but a measurable structural shift in demographic weight, capital concentration, educational attainment and, crucially, political articulation.

Soros The NED and Their Running Dogs– Fools Gold

This shift did not occur in a vacuum. Since the early 2000s, a well-documented constellation of Western regime-change organizations, most prominently the Open Society Foundations and the National Endowment for Democracy, together with their local grantees and partners , invested hundreds of millions of dollars in building what was essentially a parallel political infrastructure in Malaysia. The objective was never genuine democratic flourishing; it was controlled destabilization followed by the installation of pliable administrations. The playbook is by now familiar: lavish funding for selected NGOs, media platforms, youth movements and opposition parties; the cultivation of a cadre of Western-educated returnees armed with fashionable slogans; and the relentless amplification of corruption and human-rights themes calibrated to erode the legitimacy of the incumbent government.

The results were mixed elsewhere in Southeast Asia, spectacularly successful in some cases (Thailand’s endless cycle of coups and colour-coded mobilizations) and partial in others. In Malaysia, the strategy achieved its most conspicuous triumph in 2018. A coalition animated by little more than anti-Mahathir and anti-Najib sentiment and bankrolled in no small part by the same external networks , swept to federal power.

Irrelevance and a Painful Death in Betrayal

Figures such as Lim Kit Siang and Lim Guan Eng, Teresa Kok, Hannah Yeoh, Elizabeth Wong (all backed up by a foreign based Regime Change academic James Chin at the University of Tasmania- Julie Bishop former Foreign Minister of Australia) Waytha Moorthy and the Tamil wannabe brigade of Xavier Jaykumar, Sivarasa Rasiah, N Surendran, together with a cohort of UMNO defectors who discovered overnight principles, became the public face of a government whose real architects remained discreetly in the background. They lie scattered in a political field like unwanted rubbish after a rigged football game.

Today that government, led by Anwar Ibrahim, finds itself in an ironic position. Its original sponsors in Washington are themselves consumed by domestic political turmoil and can no longer be relied upon for the lavish subventions of the past.

Many of the 2018 coalition’s most vocal champions have either retreated into silence or are openly disillusioned. The UMNO renegades who expected generous rewards for their defection circle an increasingly preoccupied prime minister, searching for crumbs in a banquet that never materialized.

A Powerful Incentive for the Malay Majority to Regroup– Sabah is Malay

Meanwhile, the core issue that external regime-change doctrines were always designed to obscure, namely, the legitimate anxieties of the Malay-Muslim majority confronted with rapid socio-economic displacement , has not disappeared; it has merely been driven underground, only to resurface in the ballot box in forms that surprise the cosmopolitan commentariat.

Corruption, properly understood, is moral turpitude: the betrayal of public trust for private gain. It is not the existence of affirmative-action policies, nor the inevitable frictions of a multi-ethnic polity striving to correct historical imbalances. Confusing the two has been the most enduring success of the regime-change industry: it has persuaded a generation of young Malaysians that the defence of their own community’s interests is inherently corrupt, while presenting the dismantling of those interests as the highest form of virtue.

Sabah’s election results, like those in the peninsula, are therefore not an aberration. They are a delayed but entirely predictable reaction to twenty years of engineered polarization, broken promises and the slow realization that the glittering prizes of “liberal democracy” dangled before an angry electorate turned out to be fool’s gold.

A Day of Reckoning

The country now faces a moment of reckoning. The old formulas, whether the Barisan Nasional developmentalism of the Mahathir-Najib era or the Anwar coalition’s uneasy marriage of progressive rhetoric and communal horse-trading, have exhausted their credibility. What is required is not another imported revolution, but a sober, Malaysian-led reinvention of the social contract: one that acknowledges the reality of ethnic-Chinese pre-eminence in certain domains without denying the equally real anxieties of the Malay-Bumiputera majority; one that insists on transparency and accountability without making them pretexts for perpetual destabilization; and one that finally frees Malaysian politics from the puppet strings of distant foundations and their local proxies.

Only when that reinvention begins in earnest will elections in Sabah or anywhere else cease to be interpreted as mysterious upheavals and return to being what they ought to be: the orderly expression of a nation arguing with itself about its future, rather than a nation being argued over by others.

The Chinese in Malaysia as in South East Asia and elsewhere can no longer expect to be tolerated as a nation within a nation bribing their way into every domain at the expense of others using the power of money and seduction of every material kind. And the non Chinese will have to learn that in order to achieve that they themselves will have to avoid and resist the temptations of easy cheap material gains for their own salvation.