Monday, 2022 February 14
AS the Union leaves the festivities of the Lunar New Year and prepare for this week’s Union Day, which marks the Peace of Singapore 50 years ago, ending the 1948–1972 Malaiyan Wars and unshering in the era of rapid industrialization, questions are being asked: what, exactly, have we accomplished?
PM Tjung Ban Hok’s upcoming State of the Union speech might offer a clue. Our sources talk of a lengthy list being assembled in the capital Singapore, detailing almost every accomplishment made throughout the 63 years of uninterrupted, democratically elected PAP government, a competent rule that has guided the 259 million Malaiyans into growing the great Malaiyan Growth Machine into the world’s fourth largest economy, larger than even its former colonizer and current titular patron within the Commonwealth — the United Kingdom.
Indeed, under the pragmatic, wise leadership of the late PM Lee Kuan Yew and his three generations of meritocratic successors, the Union carefully managed the largest and most rapid lifting of people out of poverty in history.
They have catapulted the country to become a member of the Japan-led A9, Asia’s leading countries and industrial exports superpowers, that supply the world with the latest smartphones, semiconductors, automobiles, and almost every kind of consumer goods. There is not a single person in this world that has never seen the label, “Made in Malaiya”.
This immense economic growth, averaging at 10% in the booming 80s-90s and 7% today, is shared not only by Union citizens formerly oppressed under the heels of the lazy bumiputra sultans and adipatis, but also by the 64 million formerly starving Chinese migrants and their far more numerous descendants. In a period of five decades, they arrived by boats and feet into the Union, escaping the sheer horrors and insanity of collapsed Maoist China.
These lowly migrants then settled in mass, bringing industrial agriculture and railways to the harsh untamed lands of Sumatra and Borneo. Assisted by the Union’s land reform of forcibly buying up the lands of feudal Malay sultans and aristocrats and redistributing them to the impoverished majority tenant farmers population and migrants, the Malaiyans built and grew for themselves immense wealth unthinkable to seven generations of their ancestors.
The muddy swamps of Dumai, Singkawang, and Kwantan have been replaced by dense banking and pharmaceutical towers, elevated Maglev trains, and an average internet speed of 1 Gbps. 95% of the malaria-infested rainforests of inner Borneo and Sumatra have been cleared to make room for millions of hectares of high-intensity farmlands, providing food and living space for the Union’s highly urbanized population.
From the coasts of Kelantan and Malacca strait, to the valleys of inner Minangkabau, to the rice fields and cities of northern Java, to the endless plantations of Borneo, all are densely overpopulated to the brink with hundreds of millions of Chinese-speaking Chinese.
Whether a man is a Chinese, Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, or native jungle people has became increasingly irrelevant, all of them indistinguishable in the many jam-packed assembly lines as Malaiya turned into the “factory of the world”, along with the rest of the A9: Japan, India, Korea, Indochina, Maharlika, China, Thailand, and Burma.
Global megacorporations, domestically built and owned by Malaiyans, grew rapidly, plowing its fangs in the fight for dominance over the world’s electronics and industrial technology against competing global giants of Apple, Samsung, and Toyota. Garage geniuses-turned-billionaires in Kundian and Malauka churn out revolutionary mobile and internet platforms, upending the world through ride-hailing, e-commerce, fintech, and video-swiping social media monopolies, with user bases of billions of people.
This successes is inseparable from the far-sighted national industrial policies of the late LKY government, which has resulted in Malaiya producing 45% of the entire planet’s semiconductors supply, ferociously competing with Taiwan while providing an unchallenged competitive edge for the Union’s domestic electronics and industrial manufacturing industries.
Malaiyan cultural influence quickly found its way into the entire planet, with Malaiyan idol pop stars, sinetrons (drama series), music, movies, hot donghua (Chinese animation) characters, boy bands, and V-Tubers rapidly colonizing the phone and laptop screens of America and Europe, ferociously competing with the likes of K-POP and anime.
Similarly, much progress has been made in national and public security. From the bloody days of the 70s, violent crime, corruption, mafia operations, and especially drug trafficking have plunged to the bottom of the chart.
All thanks to a combination of both a strong welfare apparatus and a firm, increasingly tech-based, crusade against crime. A heritage of Victorian-era British colonial policy to deter crime through bankrupting fines, caning, and hanging, that has reduced the number of annual death penalty sentences to only 7133 last year, the lowest in a decade.
Despite the various military threats within and abroad, the PAP government was wise to not fall into the trap of extreme militarism. Instead, the Union opted to pacify the dangers against it through jobs, education, trade, and investments, maintaining a small yet highly specialized force to surgically keep the peace while relying on its alliance with A9, the US, the UK, and India to fend off global Salafi and Marxist intrusions.
Indeed Malaiyan foreign aid and financial interests has been the single most important force shaping the geopolitics and security framework of maritime Southeast Asia, its cheap loans and infrastructure deals too irresistible for even the most insane of local tinpot dictators.
Racial tension has been suppressed through the incredibly strict hate speech laws and the affordable mass public housing program to eradicate ghettos, by forcing most of Malaiya’s 259 million citizens to live on racially mixed neighborhoods. Indeed the Union’s public housing program is by all metrics both the largest and of the highest quality in the world, practically eliminating visible homelessness while resulting in Malaiyans having the world’s highest rate of home ownership.
The entire coasts of Malacca and Carimata straits to the northern Java coasts and its hinterlands are completely covered with ultra-dense, mixed-used, walkable, cyberpunk ocean of 50-story tall residential megatowers. Maglev tracks and public parks sprawl the ground and the air; the heavens are covered by densely packed corporate mega-headquarters that block the skies from sight, its surfaces covered with neon lamps and advertisement billboards of Vocaloid anime idols.
This constant progress stands in stark contrast to the rural Islamist and communist basket cases that packed the rest of the Malay archipelago, where dengue and malaria, pirates, and drug cartels run rampant. Where the people are kept dim and stagnant in rice fields and mineral mines. Where the bright and hard-working depart, knowing full well that the Union, not their birthplace, is the only place where they might have a hope to build themselves a brighter future.
But it will be prudent to go back to where it all began, and see how a colonial jungle nation can rise to become one of the world’s great power.
THE BIRTH OF THE UNION
“That Malaiya lay separated from all the lands of the earth, guarded by mighty oceans, is no small feat to cross, more so for the poor and the oppressed immigrants of the 15th, 19th century. Irrespective of race, the mighty seas acted as a Darwinian selector for the smartest, the most hard-working, and the bravest of the gene pool. We are their descendants.”
— Minister of Immigration KKG, 1999.
Chinese people, who today makes up 57% of the Union’s population, has teemed the lands of Malaiya since history is first recorded. Indeed much of Malaiyan history were discovered thanks to the archives of the sea-faring merchant empires of T’ang and Ming.
The latter even attempted to build trade and colonial relationship with the Malay archipelago. Certainly it eventually fell victim to European and internal hurdles after a century, but not before pumping the region with a regular stream of migrants, all seeking to find a better life in the so-called “New China”.
The Chinese were sailors and merchants, maintaining the crucial economic arteries of the archipelago aboard their Jung ships, bravely battling dangerous storms and dueling pirates in epic battles. They were the shopkeepers, bankers, and political advisers.
Indeed the Chinese was and is often pejoratively referred as the “Jews of the East”, and it is easy to see why.
Yet they too were the tin miners, plantation farmers, and construction workers, building the canals and palaces of the slothful indigenous sultans. Indeed, these gilded men hoarded untold wealth made upon the pained back of the Chinese.
Whether the sultans or the Europeans are no different. Seeing the massive profit raked by the most prolific of the 13 sultans, the Sultan of Johor, the Strait colonial administration soon implemented the “Kangchu system” across all Malaiya and opened unrestricted floodgate to Chinese migrants. Similar measures were copied by the Dutch, who were seeking to subjugate local despots under their own rule and make their colonies profitable.
Yet the Chinese persevered. As the Chinese population rapidly grew to overwhelm major urban centers of the likes of the then Kuala Lumpur (today Jilongpo) and Batavia (today Yiajiada), so too was the numbers of educated Chinese intellectuals, political party leaders, financiers, and military officers.
By the eve of the Japanese invasion, the Chinese had come to heavily involve themselves in colonial politics, often tilting towards independence. Although some called for the establishment of a “New China” based of a Chinese “kongsi” identity, most are more interested in a secular, national identity that treats every ethnicity as equal.
The occupation of Imperial Japan was brutal. The Japanese stationed the Malay sultans as puppets, and under them, the people are forced into romusha, a system of exploitative slavery. Torture, genocide, arson, disease, and famine tinted the seas of Malacca and Java red.
Of course, it was the Chinese majority who bore the brunt of this humanitarian crime. For their mainland brethrens were already the natural enemies of the invaders; indeed Malaiya was once the center of the Chinese republican movement opposing the decadent Qing dynasty. By the time of Japan’s unconditional surrender, a million Chinese from Sanpawlo to Perlis had perished.
It was by no means a walkover. The armed resistance put up by the Malaiyans was one of the most effective throughout the Second Wolrd War. Japan was never able to control more than two-thirds of Malaiya.
It was a shared fate, a baptism by fire. The seeds of the Union is planted. But so were seeds of troubles, one that will result in a tragedy perhaps even worse than Japan.
THE RECLAMATION
“Chinese people are coming. The infidel Chinese people from China are coming from the docking ships, and they’re settling everywhere, and they will outnumber us. They will kill every ulema and seize all of the land here, and we will be expelled into the mountains. We will be forced to live on top of the mountains.”
— Anti-sinic rally by the warlord General Murod, during the 1966–1971 South Sumatran Civil War.
By the time Allied invasion flooded in to remove the fascist yoke from the Straits Settlements, Federated Malay States, other five unfederated Malay states, Sarawak and Sabah territories, and the British East Indies, the divisions within Malaiyan society had reached a boiling point.
The British wanted to restore their colonial hegemony, an out-of-date imperial supremacism once known as “Cape to Canberra”. The Americans would want none of that, a policy of a new America-led world order that also rejected a French colonial return to Indochina. The Soviets are looking for ways into establishing themselves as a new global superpower.
India, united from Karachi to Delhi to Dhaka under the secular nationalist Sardar Patel, was quickly becoming a rising economic power and a leader of global decolonisation, and a model for Malaiyans who are seeking for ways to reconcile their Chinese majority with the immensely large Muslim and Indian minority.
The Chinese of Malaiya were divided. Three years of guerilla has worryingly empowered the influence of the communists, who seems more and more inclined to seize power. Standing against them was the more numerous, yet bickering, Chinese ethno-nationalists and secular liberals, who found great support from Allied powers as the iron curtain descends over Europe.
That mainland China was engulfed in a brutal civil war between the communist Kungchantang and the nationalist Kuomintang was not a good omen for what is to come.
And of course, they were the Muslim natives. While a minority, they still form a sizeable chunk of the population, and they were not pleased at the direction Malaiya is moving towards.
The traitorous collaborationist sultans, imams, and ethnic nationalist leaders who formed the backbone of the fascist rule in Malaiya may had been rounded up and killed by popular partisans or toppled by the Allied forces. But Malay insistence for the principles of Ketuanan Melayu (Lordship of Malays), a deeply racist ideology that deems the Malays alone as the owners of the land and calls for limitation of citizenship for the Chinese, is uncompromising.
The Malaiyan Emergency of 1948–1969 was a period of guerilla warfare from Maoists and Malay Islamists alike. The former wants to repeat the success of the lunatics that has conquered the Chinese mainland and instituted their totalitarian dystopia. The latter, deep in their racialist delusion, found the idea of recognizing a Chinese person as a “citizen” to be unacceptable.
Only through deep cooperation with the British was these two evil forces was finally vanquished, both through advanced British military technology and the Lee Kuan Yew government’s campaign to win the hearts and minds of the citizens.
These tragedies was soon to be eclipsed by the events at the mongrel of artificial Dutch concoction that is the Republic of United States of the Indonesia. Within it, the tens of millions of Chinese, who has inhabited the coasts and jungle mines of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo since history was first recorded, suddenly became minority in their own land, trapped in its various states concocted by a group of bureaucrats somewhere in Europe, each more artificial than the previous.
The assassination of the dictator Sukarno in 1966 at the hands of a Maluku freedom fighter was a conclusive proof that the artificial state was never meant to exist. The brutal communist coup that soon followed was the gong that signals to all oppressed under Javan imperialism, that it is time to rise up and leave.
What followed was the crescendo of the Malaiyan Wars. Thanks to the tireless, shrewd work of Malaiyan diplomats and strategists, Wahington became convinced of an imminent fall of Indonesia, the largest country in Asia, to the communists. Soon, the United States started to land troops in Sumatra and Java.
With their assistance, local resistance successfully expelled the communists yoke out of every centimeter of Chinese Sumatra, northern Java, and Borneo. Yet the Islamist ethnic nationalists was to not postpone their burning hatred against the Chinese, even in the middle of a war against a common enemy.
The 1970 genocide of Chinese people across Sumatra and Java was the spark that finally triggered the long dream of a reunification with Malaiya. Exploiting the British and US troops already committed in the isles, the shrewd Malaiyan diplomacy and military strategy successfully defeated the disparaged local warlord armies and reunited all of the dispersed Chinese diaspora, in a period now known as the Reclamation.
Malaiya did not seek a glorious triumph of conquest, but an everlasting peace based of listening to the complaints and interests of local powers and ethnic groups. Indeed the Union stood up to the powers many see as its hegemon, both the United Kingdom and the United States, and vetoed against the final invasion directly into the den of communism that is inner Java, for the result will merely be an endless conflict of guerilla warfare and destruction. The results of the Treaty of Singapore was shockingly generous, and as it will later be proven, long-lasting.
Neither the Union nor its neighbors will become just another pawn of the imperialists, be it Beijing or the rulers of the Atlantic. The era of endless bloodshed is finally over, and the era of a post-war economic miracle has begun.
THE MIRACLE ON THE JOHOR RIVER
“This saying is popular among those in the SNCICD project. That God created the world, but the Malaiyans built Singapore.”
— Minister of National Development Suppiah Dhanabalan (1990).
That the Union decided against sending troops to rush into Madiun and crush communism once and for all from Southeast Asia was not merely a calculated product based off military and humanitarian reasons. The survival of the communist state, along with the ever-present threat of another Maoist revival, meant that the United States was forced to economically and militarily help lift Malaiya from its most fragile state into a regional power able to stand on its own feet and do the job of checking against the further spread of the Red menace.
In no time, the far-sighted administration of PAP exploited the Cold War for the Union’s benefits, manipulating Washington’s manic fear against communism to extract more foreign funds and beneficial, one-sided trade deals with both the United States and the EEC. Cheap Malaiyan agricultural and commodities exports quickly overwhelmed the Western markets, crushing its more expensive local competition and generating untold amounts of fortune for the citizens of the Union.
All while the Union heavy-handedly guides its industrialization process, diligently curbing the powers of the mining and plantation oligarchs as to not threaten the elected government, careful to not fall into the deeply feared Resource Curse. Union technocrats, economists, and researchers scoured over the Earth, intensely studying and copying successful political, economic, and social policies everywhere from cyberpunk Tokyo to the Zapatistas-controlled Chiapas, documenting its benefits while modifying it to cut out its flaws.
Outdated traditional institutions and values were demolished against the unstoppable march of progress. Indeed the Union’s highly planned public affordable urban housing program, in a way, serves to rapidly convert traditional rural Malay, Javanese, and indigenous tribal societies into a modernized society ready to be a part of Western technological civilization.
Riding on this commodities boom, the Union relentlessly invested in roads, railways, sea infrastructure, education, vaccines, and healthcare. Child labor and fanatics-raising religious schools are cracked down, replaced by state-funded Western science, mathematics, high education, international scholarships, and vocational schools. Diseased and dangerous rainforests are cleared out to make way for livable human habitation spaces, palm oil plantations, and agriculture.
Unrestricted genetic engineering, industrial chemical fertilizer, state-subsidized pesticides, financial investment instruments, and Western and Israeli automated technologies replaced in totality traditional subsistence agriculture with extremely aggressive modern industrial farming, while increasing output by folds upon folds, freeing tens of millions of workforce to flock into the industrial economy instead.
Stable government, low corruption, low red tapes, professional meritocratic bureaucracies, and efase of doing business meant that foreign direct investments flocked deep into the busy trade coasts of Little Swatow and Yiajiada. The muddy swamps and jungles of the Peninsula was rapidly converted into an incredibly dense endless jungle of steel, fire, concrete, towering silos, industrial smoke-fog, housing towers, assembly line automobiles factories, textile sweatshops, cargo ports, and manufacturing mega-complexes, creating millions upon millions of jobs for both the impoverished Malaiyan population and incoming Chinese migrants from the mainland, tens of millions of whom walked by feet or traverses the dangerous oceans to frantically escape the horrors of communism in the Chinese mainland.
Indeed the Union became the largest sponsor of what will later be known as the Great Leap South, partnering with private enterprises to hand out loans and benefits for the starving Chinese peasants too poor to encourage and help them depart the yoke of Maoism, migrating into the workforce-hungry cities of Malaiya instead, carrying along with them their entire extended families, in search of a far better future. By the end of the Second Civil War, everywhere on the coasts from Shanghai to Macao are packed every day with ships carrying hordes of Chinese refugees, all departing south to join their brothers.
Everywhere from the once centers of Islamic kingdoms of Malacca, Palembang, Brunei, Cirebon, and Demak, from the beaches to deep rural lands, is now completely populated with millions upon millions of Chinese-speaking Chinese.
Of course, the rapid Chinese immigration also spills massively to neighboring Malay archipelagic states from Bandjer and Bali to the Moluccas, Papua, and even the Pacific islands, with large cities such as Manila, Cebu City, Davao, Balikpapan, Bandjarmasin, Surabaja, Macassar, Manado, Denpasar, Ternate, Ambon, Kupang, Hollandia, Port Moresby, and even Darwin and Brisbane becoming 40, 50, 60% Chinese. These Chinese immigrants, tightly connected and cooperating with their Chinese kin in Malaiya, too built a new prosperous life in their new lands, eventually seizing control as the states’ titular economic and political hegemons.
By 2022, 90% of the economy, real estate assets, and natural resources in Central and Eastern Malay Archipelago are privately owned and controlled by the cross-archipelago Chinese ruling class, most of whom associating themselves with the Kongsi government in Singapore to promote greater regional economic integration. Out of the 19 countries in the archipelagic area, 14 has a Chinese as their head of government.
Yet for now, the Chinese came as cheap migrants. Of course, the incredibly and shockingly cheap wages of Malaiyans are not to be given away for free. Singapore’s industrial policy relentlessly forced transfer, plunder, copy, plagiarizes, if not outright steal Western and Japanese technologies, designs, organizational culture, institutions, research, and intellectual properties. All in a unified national strategy to build a high-tech industrial base of its own, based of a national research and development ecosystem of lavishly-funded universities, labs, facilities companies, government research agencies, and financial and loans institutions.
By the 90s, the flood of Malaiyan minerals, oil, and agricultural products that once dominates its exports to the West has been replaced by TVs, cars, motorcycles, airplanes, machineries, fridges, cement, steel, refined petroleum, clothes, shoes, furnitures, electric parts, plastic products, and industrial consumer goods, manufactured by home-grown domestic private behemoths. Malaiya, and its neighbors, increasingly became known as the “factory of the world”.
Eye-poppingly colossal cargo ships, each far more massive than the previous, transport seemingly ever-higher unending mountains of cargo from the busy Malacca and Sunda straits, all of their watery surface heavily densely packed with the waiting ships, into every corners of the planet.
The rapid industrialization experienced by Malaiya turned its rich natural resources into a blessing, instead of a curse. Borneo’s extremely bountiful coal reserves and mining industries, once sold for cheap overseas, are now directed to fuel domestic energy needs and coal electric plants instead, generating extremely cheap and overabundant electricity and energy to power the Union’s industrial empire and aggressively enlarging dense megacities, all in all generating tenfold returns compared to the previous exports scheme.
The result of all of this development and extreme growth rates, in a period later known as the Miracle of the Rowpoh River (also known as the Miracle of the Johor River), was the exponential rise of common prosperity, wealth, and quality of life. Suddenly, hundreds of millions of those who was once peasants was able to afford a 99-year lease public housing, car, school, hospital, vacations, and quality urban life. Indeed the various state-owned real estate companies, the backbone of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program, became some of the largest companies in Southeast Asia with extensive financial outreaches, packing every empty space in sight with 30-story tall megatowers of affordable public apartment megacomplexes.
Malaiyan public housing, once dismissed by Western capitalist as yet another instance of “commieblocks”, quickly became one of Malaiyans’ uniformly shared national pride. Extensive planning of infrastructure and highly mixed city development ensures general walkability, quality cheap mass public transports, and the abundance of public and green spaces, a system that has now housed more than a hundred million people in a far more sustainable and affordable financing system than the dehumanizing Ponzi scheme that is the American suburbs.
As the Malaiya Maju Tower, once the tallest building in the world, open its doors to the general public at the beginning of the new century, the observatory reveals a birds-eye view everything that our grandfathers, our fathers, and ourselves have built. The endless city of Singapore, the largest metropolitan area in the world at 39 million inhabitants, stretching on every direction, covering every space of the earth and even into the seas with its heavily densely packed urban sprawl, far into the beyond the horizon.
THE STATE OF THE UNION
“Our beloved flag represents the core ethos of Malaiyans: pragmatism. We kept the Union jack in the corner simply as a shameless PR attempt to keep attract British military support during the Wars. The dim chastised us as colonial boot-lickers, but guess what: we won. And we gradually kicked out foreign influence anyways. And we remember.”
— Retired Mj. General Goh Chow Peng (1981).
The spectacular, sweeping collapse of global communism in 1989 from Beijing and Pyongyang to Berlin and Belgrade, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991, was the final nail in the coffin for those opposed to the unrestrainable march of neoliberal capitalist progress that has ever since brought about jobs, democracy, rapid industrialization, peace, and human rights all across the planet.
Extremely suddenly, billions of formerly oppressed peoples are thrust into a hypercompetitive world of abundant capital, unrestricted information overflow based on the free internet, and completely unchallenged American cultural, political, economic, and military hegemony.
Indeed under the hegemony of the United States, with its population of almost a billion people and its economy exceeding 70 trillion USD, the planet’s final barriers to global trade and exchange of goods and even culture are torn down. Extremely rapid digitalization of all facets of life and total domination of the American internet into every corner of Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Russian, Indian, and Latin American societies bulldozed their previous social and value structures, in favor of a uniform neoliberal Western economic-cultural system. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that the newly developed Union was perfectly situated to exploit.
Indeed, the Union soon found itself in the same role as its previous patrons of Japan, America, and the European Union. Trillions of dollars of Union investments soon found themselves flocking into newly industrializing China and Africa, both being the sites of a rapidly growing commercial market and an extreme abundance of much-demanded rare earth metals and minerals gravely needed by the accelerating technological digital revolution.
Union tech megacorporations found themselves competing against Tokyo, Bangalore, and Silicon Valley, establishing online platform total monopolies in e-commerce, semiconductor design, enterprise software, social media, ride-hailing, food delivery, and financial banking technologies all across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, accruing never-seen-before eye-popping profits.
Yet the wise decision-makers steering the conduct of the Union are not to let themselves be trampled by the unrestricted excesses of capitalist hypergrowth. Indeed, the Union’s unique economic model was soon validated during the 2008 financial recession, where the strict government guidance and funding over public housing and urban development staved off the Union from ever experiencing a disastrous economic bubble.
Instead, the extremely rapid industrialization process has brought about previously under-reported havoc in the Union’s environmental quality, biodiversity, and cohesion of its ethnically and religiously diverse society.
Malaiya’s extreme unrestricted exploitation and mining of Borneo’s coal by its state-owned enterprise, while successfully resulting in an abnormally abundant supply and low cost of energy and natural resources for the Union and its industries, has completely and irreversibly obliterated the ecosystems of its Borneo territories and its three adjacent native states. Indeed there are signs that Borneo’s coal and mineral supplies might finally be dwindling, threatening the continuity of Malaiyan energy independence.
State-owned palm plantations and cash crop industrial agriculture in much of Sumatra and Borneo were meanwhile far more destructive, irreversibly completely eradicating every inch of rainforests and wetlands in the two islands, drying its soil, changing its weather pattern, and cascadingly transforming its ecological system. Exception being Borneo’s mountain regions, where simple logistical costs and inadequate infrastructure became the last lines of defense from Malaiyan hyper-industrialization.
Such is why PM Tung is expected to announce the long-planned Trans-Borneo Toll Road megaproject to bring a decisive end to these resistance and fully integrate the entire Borneo, including its four eastern independent native states, under Singapore’s economic control. Yet it is the treatment of indigenous Malay and Dayak peoples that the Chinese-dominated Union has so far been struggling to manage.
Indeed in the name of economic growth, Union government and its secret police apparatus has long maintained an authoritarian policy against native environmental activists, feudal Malay land rights activists, and Maoist guerillas, regularly employing public demonization campaigns, extrajudicial arrests, kidnapping, torture, and forcible displacement of entire populations from their ancestral territories.
Approximately 98% of Malaiya’s tribal Bornean population now live in dense urban reservations spread deep within the Union’s many coastal cyberpunk megacities, far away from the archipelagic interior, which has been emptied of anyone but plantation workers, engineers, and Chinese settlers.
Malaiya’s massive push for the replacement of the archipelago’s jungle characteristics with orderly plantations, road networks, and thoughtfully-planned public housing and ordered urban settlements are but part of Singapore’s many schemes to obliterated resisting native cell and fundamentally restructure their society and culture into a more civilized, Confucian-Western, harmonious society.
This culture of paternalistic authoritarianism also extends to the extremely rapid digitalization experienced by the Union. Indeed the Union is one of the last nations in the world without a data privacy law. For Singapore prefers direct and top-down collaboration with the tech megacorporations, whether domestic or foreign, giving it free access the data of its citizens to shape ever-better public policies.
Financial transactions and online shopping purchases, social media posts, GPS locations, YouTube scrolling behaviors, none are free from the all-watching eyes of the Kongsi government. In return, the government vehemently promotes public transparency to its codes of conducts, as to invite the public to participate or criticize the data-driven policymaking process while preventing unscrupulous state actors from abusing this immense powers.
The result of this responsible, utter dismissal of privacy, except for the most basics, has reformed the Union to become the world’s first “data-state”. Abundant funding, non-existent regulations, and a firm tech ecosystem has resulted in the Union becoming the forefront of global research in artificial intelligence.
Omnipresent public surveillance has allowed for the mass adoption of facial recognition-based payment system, rapidly extinguishing the concept of “cash money” from the entire Union. Pension, child benefits, and healthcare safety nets are no longer dictated by the whims of bureaucrats; instead payments are hyperpesonalized and customized to suit the immediate needs and obligations of each Union citizens. All while enabling the Union to detect and crack down upon greedy healthcare providers and suppliers with an iron fist.
Interest rates and incredibly complex taxation schemes are brainstormed not by boneheaded populist politicians, but by machine learning. Autogenerative AI increasingly replaces government bureaucrats and community input in city zoning planning, coming up with out-of-the box solutions to packed even far more people to the Union’s megacities, along with its increasingly ludicrous complexity in logistics, public transport, water, electricity, and sewage, along with its models for maintenance funding long into the future.
Indeed, the seemingly still unending flood of economic migrants from the Chinese mainland, the Indian subcontinent, and most importantly the Malay Archipelago — stripping the latter completely and utterly dry of talents and brain power — all attracted by the Union’s open door policy, has ensured Greater Yiajiada to be projected to eclipse Greater Singapore and grow to an astounding 45 million people by 2050, the rest of the Union’s major cities of Georgetown, Ipoh, Jilongpo, Kwala Tengkalow, Kwantan, Malauca, Mianlan, Dumai, Tiopei, Chowkwang, Telok Betong, Jingliwen, Sanpawlo, Tanrong-Pinlang, Pingkang, Singkawang, Kundian, Ketapang, and Pangkalanpen following a similar trajectory.
Indeed the massive, continuous inflow of immigrants, their similarly high birth rates, and Malaiya’s generous government childcare and leave provisions means that Malaiya’s population is projected to reach an unprecedented 310 million by 2050, with the Chinese ethnicity holding to just a razor thin majority.
Of course, all of this would have been an utter environmental disaster of water shortage and extreme soil depletion, with basically all the water aquifers and rivers in Java, Peninsula, Sumatra, and coastal Borneo having been utterly and irreparably dried by extreme urban growth, had the Union not mastered the art of modular nuclear power, solar, and wind technologies, with its nuclear fuel largely extracted from apparently giant reserves deep beneath the rainforests of nearby West Papua. These sustainable energies has powered not only the megacities, but the truly gigantic oceanic desalination plants providing abundant water to Malaiyan hyper-urban settlements.
Unending queue of gigantic cargo ships brought food from export nations of terraformed Australian, African, and Eastern European plains. Indeed even despite its mass destruction of increasingly depleted Borneo rainforests to be converted to agriculture, the Union’s increasingly extreme reliance on food imports has driven it to become a key and active player in preserving global peace and friendship, as to protect the fragile system feeding nearly all of the Union’s population.
Such is the state of the Union: a product of technological modernity. A nation completely dependent on its innovative brain and engineering prowess to continue to survive, else everything collapses.
Should it is able to weather the uncertainties of the 21st century, no doubt shall it become one of the most powerful nation on the planet, practically annexing the rest of the Malay Archipelago under the Kongsi economic and cultural control.
Happy Union Day, and may Malaiya ever forwards.
