ABSTRACT
The occasion for Lim’s outburst was an unusually bad-tempered debate in the Council over education policy. Governor Cecil Clementi had embarked on a programme to ‘Malayanize the children of the permanent population’. In this regard, the colonial government terminated grants to Chinese and Tamil vernacular schools and provided free primary education only in the Malay language. In protest, Lim made an impassioned speech, resigned his nomination and broke the decorum of British civility by walking out of the Council. The conflict was as much over what should constitute a hybrid Malayan identity as it was over the political status of the Chinese in British Malaya. Clementi and his elite technocrats conceived of a Malayan identity that would depoliticize Chinese nationalists by turning their China-oriented eyes on a Malaya defined by an Anglo-Malay centre. On the other hand, Lim envisioned a multicultural Malayan identity allowing the Chinese to control their cultural development without being forced to acculturate to an Anglo-Malay hegemony.2
