Managed Industrialisation Under Trusteeship

In an important sense, the failure of the Malaysian agricultural and rural development policies to solve rural poverty could be attributed to the phenomenon of ‘urban bias’. ¹ Under the NEP industrialisation, especially manufacturing, was chosen as the ‘leading sector’ of the big development push. ² The objective of the Malaysian strategy of industrialisation was not solely the maximisation of the growth rate. More fundamentally, it was to modernise and urbanise the Malays. This was called socio-economic restructuring ‘to reduce and eventually eliminate the identification of race with economic function.’ ³ In other words, industrialisation was to be managed by trustees to achieve racial balance.