Speech by the DAP candidate for the Serdang State By election, Mr. Lim Kit Siang who is also DAP Organising Secretary, at the fourth DAP Serdang by-election public rally held at Sungei Way New Village on Sunday, 8th December , 1968 at 8 p.m:
Mr. Thuan Phaik Fook is graduate of the Nanyang University. He said at the first Alliance rally in Serdang last Thursday that the voters should elect him as Assemblyman, because he would fight for the Chinese-educated in the country.
Mr. Thuan told the public that before he joined the MCA, he had wrong ideas about the MCA and had condemned the MCA. He was then getting a salary of $120 a month, after graduating from the Nanyang University, later, through introduction of a friend, he get a job in the MCA, with a salary of five to six hundred dollars. It was then he found that the MCA was a good party.
Mr. Thuan is entitled to change his political views. I only wonder how many Nanyang University graduate will have the same opportunity as Mr. Thuan to discover that the MCA is a good party, for five or six hundred dollars a month.
As Mr. Thuan claims that he is a champion of Chinese language, education and culture, I want to ask Mr. Thuan ten questions, so that the Serdang voters can really know where Mr. Thuan stand on important and fundamental issues.
Language
(1) Does Mr Thuan support Chinese as an official language in Malaysia, which can be freely used in the Parliament, State Assemblies, government correspondence and public notices?
(2) Does Mr. Thuan accept that Chinese is a Malaysian language, by virtue of the fact that it is used by large numbers of Malaysians, and that it should be promoted and allowed free development?
(3) Does Mr. Thuan reject the UMNO concept that only the Malay language is the Malaysian language, and the UMNO intention to build ‘one nation, one language’, as declared by UMNO leaders publicly repeatedly.
Education
(4) Does Mr. Thuan support the Abdul Rahman Talib Education Report and Alliance Education policy to close down all Chinese primary schools, and to convert them into Malay-media primary schools.
(5) Does Mr. Thuan support the DAP education policy, which calls for an integrated education system, whereby the major language, including Chinese, serve as main media of instruction and examination?
(6) Does Mr. Thuan support the Merdeka University project, and deplore the MCA’s opposition to this project?
(7) Does Mr. Thuan agree that the MCA College is merely a political stunt to counter the Merdeka University project, and that after the next general elections, the MCA College will become a Malay College, because it contravenes the Abdul Rahman Talib Education Report which would only allow Malay as the sole media of instruction in all educational institutions.
(8) Does Mr. Thuan support the immediate recognition of Nanyang and Formosan University degrees and qualification, and deplore the UMNO and the MCA for opposing this?
Culture
(9) Does Mr. Thuan reject the view by Inche Senu bin Abdul Rahman, the Information Minister, and Dr. Syed Naguib Alatas of Gerakan, that Malaysian literature can only be written in the Malay language; and that writings by Malaysians in other languages are all unMalaysian products.
(10) Does Mr. Thuan reject the view by Inche Musa Hitam, UMNO Executive Secretary, and Dr. Syed Naguib Altas of Gerakan, that Malaysian culture must be based on Malay.
Audited on 2021-03-17