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WHY AN IDEA TO NOMINATE CHINESE NEW VILLAGES AS A UNESCO SITE GOT MALAYSIANS
RILED UP

A fourth-generation resident of Sungai Way New Village on the outskirts of Kuala
Lumpur outside his home.ST PHOTO: AZRIL ANNUAR
Azril Annuar
UPDATED Mar 19, 2024, 01:05 PM

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KUALA LUMPUR – At first glance, Sungai Way looks like any other suburb in
Malaysia’s Klang Valley, with a thriving wet market, a police station, a school
and rows of shophouses along its main road.

Zinc-roofed shacks abut low-rise concrete buildings, and a few wooden
kampung-style houses have survived the decades that saw most of their ilk
replaced by brick homes. Some residences rise up to five storeys high, housing
several families or, quite commonly, serving as dormitories for workers at
nearby factories.

At a street corner, gleaming green dragons perch in front and on the roof of a
bright orange building – the only temple in this kampung baru cina or Chinese
new village of around 4,000 residents, mainly Chinese, with a few Malays and
Indonesian permanent residents who migrated there to work at the factories.



But this bustling little town on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur has a dark past.

It was one of 631 internment camps for the Chinese set up around Peninsular
Malaysia by British colonialists during the Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960,
when the country fought a communist insurgency against British rule.

Recently, a short-lived proposal to nominate seven of Selangor’s Chinese new
villages as a Unesco World Heritage site opened up old wounds and sparked
racially tinged debates about cultural recognition in Malaysia.



Local Government Development Minister Nga Kor Ming announced on Feb 1 that
preparations were in the works to seek Unesco recognition for the “cultural and
historical significance” of the villages. The Unesco status would help promote
Malaysian Chinese history and culture through tourism, he said.

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The news drew a swift backlash, which eventually quietened down after the
Selangor government said on March 5 that there were no plans to obtain the
heritage site status for any villages in the state.

By then, Malay nationalists from Umno and the opposition had slammed the idea.
Historians also weighed in for and against it, with views that ran the gamut
from how it could help preserve Chinese history and culture, to how the culture
in the villages was “nothing special”, and how the bid smacked of exploitation
of a painful historical period for the sake of attracting tourist dollars.



Opposition party Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia’s youth chief Wan Ahmad Fayhsal
Wan Ahmad Kamal challenged the “historical and unity value” of Selangor’s
Chinese new villages on Feb 5, calling them “remnants of the Cold War where we
fought the threat of the communist terrorists”. He said: “It is more appropriate
to designate Kampung Baru Kuala Lumpur as a Unesco World Heritage site, because
its historical value makes the country more in line with the policy and identity
of Malaysia.”

The 125-year-old Malay settlement with traditional wooden Malay homes near the
Petronas Twin Towers in the capital city has been under threat from
urbanisation. On March 13, the federal government confirmed it has no plans to
seek Unesco heritage status for Kampung Baru as that would impede development
plans for the area.

Umno framed Mr Nga’s proposal as a challenge to the rights of the Malays as the
country’s indigenous community.

“When an area is recognised as a World Heritage site, it also automatically
recognises the residents, their culture, language and education as natives,”
argued the party’s secretary-general Asyraf Wajdi Dusuki on Feb 9.

Mr Nga countered the claims on the same day, saying the proposal for the new
villages was “not a zero-sum game” and that others were welcome to nominate
Malay villages or other places as Unesco heritage sites.

The minister is from the multiracial but Chinese-led Democratic Action
Party, which has often been accused by its critics of undermining Malay-Muslim
rights.

On March 11, he revealed in Parliament that the nomination of the Chinese new
villages had been mooted by the International Council on Monuments and Sites
(Icomos) Malaysia, which advises the Unesco World Heritage Committee.

Icomos set up a new village working group in March 2021 to study and assess the
suitability of the Chinese new villages for nomination as a world heritage site,
Mr Nga said, adding that the current government was not in office at that time.

The new Sungai Way market. The original market was built in 1948 and upgraded in
the 1970s.ST PHOTO: AZRIL ANNUAR

Former Petaling Jaya MP Kua Kia Soong had called the proposal an “insult” to
those who fought against British colonialism, adding that the new villages were
“nothing short of concentration camps, designed and enforced by the British
colonial power”.

“Families were torn apart, livelihoods destroyed, and cultural heritage
disregarded in the name of colonial supremacy,” Mr Kua, who is also the director
of human rights organisation Suaram, said in an open letter on Feb 13.

Proposing the inclusion of new villages under the Unesco World Heritage sites
“trivialises the trauma of those who suffered within their confines”, he added.

More on this Topic
Here are some of Unesco’s new World Heritage sites Breathing new life into the
old town of Kota Tua in Jakarta

From the 1950s, thousands of rural villagers, in particular ethnic Chinese, had
been forcibly moved into “new villages” surrounded by barbed wire and sentry
towers, to isolate them from the influence of communist guerillas who were
staked out in surrounding jungles.

The British government at the time believed that Chinese communities were giving
assistance and supplies to the insurgents, either voluntarily or under coercion
at gunpoint.

Mr Ding Eow Chai, the head of Sungai Way New Village, in front of the community
hall that houses a museum.ST PHOTO: AZRIL ANNUAR

“(The Chinese villagers) had only around two days to pack everything and move.
Some were forced into poverty,” Sungai Way New Village head Ding Eow Chai, 59,
told The Straits Times.

“Those interred in these camps faced hardship. They lost their freedom. Many
rich Chinese in the rural areas also lost their fortunes as they had to leave
everything behind in the blink of an eye,” he added.

The Sungai Way village was originally founded in 1949 by Chinese who worked as
rubber tappers and in tin mines in the surrounding area.

The British transformed it into a camp with 650 homes in 1950. Residents from
the surrounding areas, including several Malay families, were uprooted and
resettled in the village, where each family was given around 5,000 sq ft of land
to build a home.

A police station was built inside the camp itself to monitor and control the
local population, while a Chinese school and a market were built to serve the
new “villagers”, who were placed under curfews and movement controls.

Ms Yuri Tan with her late grandfather’s identification documents and permits to
work outside the enclosed Sungai Way settlement.ST PHOTO: AZRIL ANNUAR

Fifty-year-old Yuri Tan, a third-generation villager, said her late grandfather
needed multiple identification papers and permits in order to go in and out of
the village while working as a rubber tapper.

“The authorities would check to see if he was taking more food than necessary
when he went to work and also when he came home, after purchasing food at the
market. The families here also had food stamps. They could not purchase more
rice per day than what was needed.

“The British didn’t want us to supply the communists,” said Ms Tan, who is an
artist.

Back then, her family home had a few bedrooms, a small kitchen with a wooden
stove, a deep well, an indoor bathroom, an outhouse, a living area and a pig
sty. Today, its wooden structure and attap roof are gone, after renovations that
also added modern amenities.

Constructed in the 1950s, the Tho Guan Seng Temple was at one time the only
place of worship for the Chinese community in Sungai Way.ST PHOTO: AZRIL ANNUAR

Historical society Pusaka’s president Eddin Khoo said the Chinese new villages
and their history are “not a thing to be flaunted for tourist purposes and
profit-making”. 

The race-based arguments that arose in February over the Unesco nomination plan
also trouble him.

“I am concerned about the opposition to it, which is basically saying that the
history of Chinese new villages is not part of Malaysian history. There are
serious consequences to it. To claim the Chinese new villages are not part of
history is an attempt at suppression.

“History being written according to communal lines is repulsive, everyone has a
history here. This segregation is nonsense. People are speculating and
fictionalising their community history, putting certain history in a position of
prominence and downplaying others,” he said.

Despite the Selangor government’s shelved plans, Sungai Way village chief Ding
still holds out hope that settlements like his will be recognised as heritage
sites.

The original front door of a Sungai Way house preserved at the village museum.ST
PHOTO: AZRIL ANNUAR
More on this Topic
Old tea forests in China’s Pu’er gain Unesco World Heritage Site statusWorld
sites vie for spot on Unesco heritage list as Venice risks downgrade

He also heads the village museum, which displays old photographs of the
villagers’ daily lives in the internment camp, their personal items such as toys
and wheelbarrows, maps, and the permits and identification documents they used
then.

Obtaining heritage status, he said, will help promote volunteer-run,
community-funded initiatives like these.

“So more people will be aware of what Chinese new villagers went through in the
past,” he said.



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