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Home > JOURNAL > Vol. 3 (2014) > Number 1

 

Abstract

This paper traces the settlement history of the Chinese in Kajang (and Sungai Chua), as seen in particular through an account of their economic and religious life. Kajang, as a small town turned Klang Valley satellite town locale, presents the opportunity to examine immigrant small-town Chinese society in the setting of the tin, rubber and land settlement economy which was the making of colonial Malaya. At the same time, its participation in the vigorous demographic, economic and social development of the Klang Valley in the past 30 years provides a setting for an understanding of the forces of transformation in the social and religious landscape of contemporary Malaysian Chinese society. The paper makes two arguments. First, it argues that settlement was far more integral to the process of Chinese migration to colonial Malaya than the evocative figure of the “sojourner”, widely seen to be typical of the Chinese migrant, suggests. Second, it argues that in the course of the recent New Economic Policy (NEP) decades, a new, tertiary-educated, sinophone but multilingual, Malaysian Chinese middle class has emerged, concentrated in the Klang Valley, whose political and cultural imaginations are of great significance in understanding the dynamics of Malaysian society today.

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