Singapore warns US on anti-China rhetoric!

By Shaun Tandon (AFP)

Suggestions on how to contain China's rise may spark reaction

WASHINGTON — Singapore urged the United States to be careful in comments on China, warning that suggestions of a strategy to contain the rising power could cause strife in Asia.

On a visit to Washington, Foreign Minister K. Shanmugam voiced confidence that the State Department accepted the need for cooperation with China but said that US domestic politics "resulted in some anti-China rhetoric."

Singaporean Foreign Minister and Minister for Law K. Shanmugam attends "The Singapore Conference" in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2012. Shanmugam is currently visiting Washington to meet US policy makers. AFP PHOTO/JEWEL SAMAD

"We in Singapore understand that some of this is inevitable in an election year. But Americans should not underestimate the extent to which such rhetoric can spark reaction which can create a new and unintended reality for the region," he said.

Singapore is a close partner of Washington and home to a key US military logistical base.

But the city-state is highly dependent on trade and has sought smooth commercial relations with Asia's major economic powers such as China, Japan and India.

"It's quite untenable -- quite absurd -- to speak in terms of containment of China. That's a country with 1.3 billion people," Shanmugam told a conference on Singapore at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

China "is determined to progress in all fields and take its rightful place in the community of nations. It will succeed in that venture," he said.



The United States, while looking to trim spending on its giant military to tame a soaring debt, has set a priority on Asia as rapid economic growth and the rise of China look set to reshape the region.

The US military has sought closer cooperation with the Philippines and Vietnam, which have accused China of increasingly bellicose actions to assert control over disputed territories in the South China Sea.

Shanmugam said that the United States should also look at other ways of engagement in Asia such as pressing ahead with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an emerging trade pact that involves at least nine countries.

It is "a mistake to focus only on the US military presence in the region, to the exclusion of other dimensions of US policy," he said.

President Barack Obama's administration has repeatedly said that it welcomes the rise of China and will try to find areas for cooperation.

Vice President Joe Biden, ahead of a US visit by his counterpart Xi Jinping, called in a statement Wednesday for the two powers to work together on "practical issues."

Addressing the same conference as Shanmugam, senior US diplomat Kurt Campbell agreed it was "very important we're careful about our rhetoric" and said that the United States wanted a relationship with China "based on the well-being" of both countries.

"Every country in Asia right now wants a better relationship with China. That's natural and any American strategy in the region has to be based on that fundamental recognition," said Campbell, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia.

"It is also the case that every country in Asia, I believe, also wants a better relationship with the United States," he said.

Shanmugam did not cite examples of "anti-China" comments in the United States, but a number of US lawmakers have raised fears about Beijing's rise.

At a congressional hearing Tuesday, Representative Dana Rohrabacher called for the United States to ramp up support for the Philippines to help the democratic US ally assert its claims in maritime disputes with China.

"We need to stand as aggressively and as solidly with the Filipino government in their confronting an aggressive, arrogant China -- expansionist China -- as we have stood with them against radical Islam," said Rohrabacher, a Republican from California.

Economic disputes with China have also come to the forefront.

In a recent television commercial that outraged Asian American groups, Representative Pete Hoekstra -- a Republican seeking a Senate seat in Michigan -- attacked his opponent with an advertisement criticizing US debt to China.

In the advertisement, a young Asian woman -- in a setting that looked more like Vietnam than China -- said in broken English, "Your economy get very weak; ours get very good."

Hang Tuah, etc. found not Malay but Chinese!

Origins of Hang Tuah ( and Hang Jebat Hang Lekiu etc)

By John Chow

Findings of the team of scientists, archaeologist, historian and other technical staff from the United State, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Yemen & Russia

The graves of Hang Tuah, Hang Jebat, Hang Lekiu and their close friends have been found and  their skeletons had been analysed.  Their DNA had been analysed and it is found that Hang Tuah, Hang Jebat, Hang Lekiu etc. are not Malay,  but Chinese  (Islamic Chinese,  just like the famous Admiral Cheng Ho).  Malacca was a protectorate of China at that time,  andthe Emperor of China sent the Sultan of Malacca “yellow gifts’ as a token of his sovereignty.  The 5 warrior brothers were believed to be sent to help protect Malacca and its Sultan from Siam (Thailand). 

The Sultans of Malacca was directly descended from the Parameswara from Indonesia who fled to Tamasek (Singapore) and then to Malacca.  The Malaccan Sulatanate family eventually spread and became the Sultanate of the other Malay states of Perak and Johor.  Therefore,  the Sultanate royal court and the aristocrats of the Malay sultanates are actually foreigners from Sumatra and Java.  Hang Tuahand his friends were the protectors of the Indonesian aristocratic Parameswara family who came to Malaya around 1400 AD and claimed sovereignty of the land. 

For confirmation please refer to:-

The Federal Association of Arc & Research of Michigan, USA

John Chow’s notes:-

Hang is an unusual surname or name for a Malay. It sounds like s corruption of a Chinese surname.

In fact,Chinese names start with the surname first, and given names last.Malay names start with the given names first and the father’s name last(as in Ahmad bin Yusuf which means “Ahmad, the son of Yusuf).There is no surname in traditional Malay. There is no surname to carry forward to the next generation.

We also need to examine the genealogy.  We know that Hang Tuah’s father was Hang Mamat.  Here,  we do not see a Malay name transmission.  We see a name being carried forward.  It is also noted that the placement of the name that is carried forward is in front.  This indicates that the surname is “Hang”.  It is the transmission of Chinese names.  

We also know that Hang Tuah’s son is Hang Nadim.  Again,  the name “Hang” is carried forward,  and yet again,  auspiciously in front,  as a Chinese name would be,  with the surname in front.  There is no indication of a Malay naming convention.

Note that Hang Nadimis also known as Si Awang (Malays would colloquially refer to others as “Si”.   “A”  or “Ah” is a common prefix for referring to others in Chinese.  Thus,  a person with surname Wang/Huang would be referred to as “Si Ah Wang” in Malaysia  - Mr. Ah Huang) by the Malays. 

Note that Hang Tuah’smother is Dang Merdu.  “Dang” would be quite an unusual surname for a Malay also.  However,  “Dang”  or “Tang” is a common Chinese surname.  Note that the name “Dang”  is in front,  signifying that this is a Chinese naming convention,  yet again. 

Some Malays will argue that “Hang” is an honorific term (Humba) for those that serve the royal courts.  http://www.freewebs.com/suaraanum/0506b02.htm   This argument is not tenable.  Firstly,  where is the precedence in sultanates that preceded the Malaccan Sultanate?  Secondly,  where is the evidence that this is so in succeeding sultanates?  Thirdly,  where is the evidence that this practice was carried out in the sultanate of that time?  And has that Sultan given it to other court official and the royal family and their court officials and courtesans?  Where is the evidence?  Fourthly,  since Hang Tuah’s father is called Hang Mamat,  then he would have served the Sultan prior to Hang Tuah.  But there is no evidence this is so.  In fact,  there is evidence that Hang Tuah was a very poor kid in the village.  His father was not a high court official,  and he was not brought up in the court.  In addition,  since if Hang Tuah’s father Hang Mamat had already served as a high court official,  why must Hang Tuah be educated in Bahasa Melayu and court etiquette etc. again since the family is already indoctrinated in royal protocol? 

"Dalamperbendaharaan nama-namaorang Melayu semasa zaman kesultanan Melaayu Melaka, tiada terdapat nama-nama seumpama Hang Tuah, Hang Kasturi, Hang Jebat, Hang Lekir, Hang Lekiu, ringkasnya ringkasan yang bermula dengan ¡®Hang¡¯. Sejarah juga telahmencatatkan nama-nama dari bangsa Cinayang bermula dengan Hang, Tan, Maa dan Lee. Ia bergantung kepadasuku kaum atau asal-usul keturunan mereka dari wilayah tertentudari China. Kemungkinan untuk mendakwa bahawa gelaran ¡®Hang¡¯ telah dianugerahkan oleh Raja-Raja Melayu juga tiadaasasnya. "

The last sentence loosely translates as, "There's the possibility to propose that the term "Hang" conferred as ahonorific by the Malay Kings also has no basis."

 Moreover,  before the time of the 5 warriors with their close families during this close period of relationship with the Chinese,  there are no Malays with this name.

Note that the Chinese ‘princess’ who married the Sultan of Malacca was called “Hang Li Po”.  Here,  we not only see the same name,  but the name is also in front,  indicating a Chinese naming convention.  Hang Li Po brought along with her many servants and bodyguards from China who became the Baba and Nyonya's of Malacca  -  these folk exist to this day.  Chinese who do not know how to speak or write Chinese.  They have been totally ‘malayanised”.  Babas are people of Chinese descend who have been malayanised to such an extent that they wear Malay clothing, eat Malay food (with some Chinese food), speak Malay, and do not speak or write Chinese.  Malacca is famous for its Baba communities.  The only thing that is Chinese about them is that they are of Chinese ancestry.  If you say that Hang Tuahis a Malay in the same sense that these Chinese have been malayanised,  then you might be quite right.  However,  at this present moment,  we are arguing on the basis whether he was an ethnic Malay or an ethnic Chinese,  in the sense of blood ancestry. . 

There is an old Chinese tradition where warriors or servants in the royal palace were given or re-issued with surnames given by the emperor,  to signify that they belong to the emperor,  or to one of his offsprings.  Therefore,  it is possible that some very special bodyguards of the emperor or the royal family,  have the same surname to signify that they are a unit formed especially to protect that one owner.  Since the Princess Hang Li Po was given away in marriage to a strategic partner whose land the emperor wanted to ensure is safe and stable,  heassigned a group of able warriors to the Princess Li Po,  and he gave their families the same surname.  This is not an unusual practice for the Chinese emperor. 

As for Hang Kasturi having 4 characters in his name,  it is unusual,  but it does happen that some Chinese have only 2 characters,  and some have 4 characters in their names.  For example,  my paternal grandmother had only 2 characters in her name. 

See: http://www.anu.edu.au/asianstudies/ahcen/proudfoot/mmp/rtm/teachers.html

 

In the GENEALOGICAL TREE OF THE ROYAL FAMILIES OF PERAK STATE  (http://www.geocities.com/aizaris/genealogy),  you may note 2 things:-

1)            Evidence that traditional Malay naming conventions do not carry the name of the father forward.

2)            There is no surname to carry forward

3)            Neither name nor surname are placed in front.

4)            The genealogy of the early part of the lineage tree makes reference to Chinese ancestry:-  “Putera   Chedra China”   “Puetra China”   and then later  “Paduka Sri Cina”  

This proves there has been early Chinese links in the Malay/Indonesian races and aristocratic lineages.

 One Malay argued that Hang Tuah was already in the service of the Sultan before Hang Li Po was sent to Malacca.  However,  there is not evidence of this.  A probable reference is the semi folklore Hikayat Hang Tuah,  whicjh is not very reliable as it has many contradiction to SejarahMelayu.  From the Ming Dynasty chronicles does not mention Hang Li Po or Hang Tuah but did mention the trip of Sultan Mansur Shah.  See: http://thepenangfileb.bravepages.com/histr36.htm

It is even possible that Hang Li Po was a minor “princess”  (ie.  only a daughter of a court official) who the emperor ordered to be given away to marry a vassal sate in order to ensue loyalty and close diplomatic relation.  The whole event was blown up to given the foreign king a big ego boost that the great Chinese overlord gave him his own daughter in marriage!  (It is doubtful that the conservative Chinese emperors would give their daughters away to somebody living in a foreign land very far away).  It has happened before in the history of China.  For example,  the Tibetans think that their King Sonten Gampo forced the Chinese emperor to give away his daughter in marriage in order to make peace with great big powerful Tibet.  The story from the Chinese side is that the Chinese emperor tricked the egotistical Tibetan king into believing that the palace maid was a princess and sent her off with her retinue and gifts.  It was a ‘diplomatic trick”.  Therefore,  it is possible that the Chinese court repeated the trick on Sultan Mansur Shah,  and gave him a “Chinese princess” with many gifts for the Sultan.  In the meantime,  he sent some warriors to the Sultanate to help ensure peace, safety and stability in the region – all in China’s national interests.  Protect your friends and your interests will be protected.  Or it could have been a ploy used by the Chinese emperor and the Malaccan sultan to use this marriage of a “princess” to deter the Siamese kings from encroaching on Malaccan territory.   Siam would not dare to invade Malacca whose sultan is a son in law of the mighty Chinese empire!

Footnote:-

The 5 sworn brothers who studied and practised Silat together are:-

Hang Tuah, Hang Jebat, Hang Lekir, Hang Lekiu and Hang Kasturi. 

Further references:-

Serajah Melayu– History of the Malay Peninsula

http://www.sabrizain.demon.co.uk/malaya/parames.htm

Parameswara and the founding of the Sultanate of Malacca    by John Chow

 This is my limited understanding of this subject matter.

Related posts:

Malaysian History & Legend; facts & fallacies; myths ...

Hang-ups over Malaysian history 

'Occupy' protest, inside a revolution

Occupy! Scenes from Occupied Movement  

Books review by Andrew Ross guardian.co.uk, 

Occupy Wall Street demonstrators stage a march dressed as corporate zombies. Photograph: EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images

Occupy Wall Street is wintering. That's not to say its seasoned recruits are taking time off, though there surely are equivalents of the "summer soldier and sunshine patriot" that Tom Paine invoked in his address to the Valley Forge winter encampment of the revolutionary Continental Army 236 years ago. But it's been business as usual at 60 Wall Street, in the cavernous atrium of the Deutsche Bank building, where OWS working groups have been meeting continuously since the early weeks of the occupation. In those well-attended huddles, all sorts of plans are being made for re-occupations in the months to come – an American Spring to rival the Arab one – and the air is thick with proposals for ever bolder actions.

1. Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America
2. by Astra Taylor, Keith Gessen et al

Still, it's not a bad time to take stock of the early months of the movement. The publication of two books is an occasion either to reminisce about, or catch up with the momentous events that originated in Lower Manhattan just one week after the 10th anniversary of 9/11. The respective publishers, Verso and OR Books, are natural allies of the movement, and are to be saluted for delivering the first two book-length treatments – there will be many others in the year ahead.

Both volumes are documentaries of the heady life of the encampment at Zuccotti Park, though each book has a distinct flavour, and they deploy quite different methods of reporting. Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America reads like a series of diary entries – on-the-ground vignettes, testimonials of events, and snap analysis of where it might all be heading. Included are fragments of speeches by visiting luminaries – Angela Davis, Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Solnit, Judith Butler – but the bulk of the entries are from writers with close ties to New York City's left-wing media organs: n+1, New Inquiry, Triple Canopy and Dissent. By contrast, Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action that Changed America by Writers for the 99% (OR Books, £10) takes the form of a more orthodox narrative, quarried out of interviews from a field ethnography of Zuccotti Park undertaken by many hands and then polished by a team of writers.



Most of the contributors to these books are movement participants – not armchair analysts or journos on a short deadline – so the pages of each volume ring with authenticity.

On the face of it, any book about Occupy might have been superfluous. After all, the movement has been so meticulously documented by its own participants through a variety of media–official websites, blogs, tweets, livestreaming and other social media channels, in addition to alternative radio and TV, and a steady flow of pamphlets, gazettes, journals and other print outlets. Never has a protest movement documented and broadcast its doings in real time with such utter transparency and to such a far-flung audience. In some respects, the sheer volume of self-generated media has even pre-empted the need for conventional media coverage. Forging an alternative society – and many occupiers saw Zuccotti Park as a prefiguration, if not a microcosm, of such a society – requires the creation of your own autonomous institutions.

Despite this spate of agit-prop, reflection and analysis, the conventional book formats stand up quite well, and, on certain topics, are indispensable. Occupy! abounds with insights on how the occupiers have dealt with internal challenges to their experiment in direct democracy. A general assembly in full flow is a galvanic prospect; "more than one speaker," it is noted, publicly "expressed love for the general assembly".

But the GA's horizontal culture is also an open invitation to assassins of this kind of joy. Complaints about the neglect of race and gender are the most common, righteous cause of disturbance, and when the outcome reinforces the GA's reliance on the "progressive stack" – whereby speakers of (white, male-identified) privilege are encouraged to "step back" – the interference has an alchemy that is breathtaking.

Manissa Maharawal describes how she and other members of South Asians for Justice stood up to block the GA consensus on the Declaration of the Occupation of Wall Street: she "felt like something important had just happened, that we had just pushed the movement a little bit closer to the movement I would like to see".

GAs also attract their share of people "damaged by capitalism" and further frazzled by brutal policing and the roughneck life of 24/7 activism. Their fractious behaviour is at odds with the smoother, educated norms of civic speech, and they often violate the rules of GA process.

As the Zuccotti Park occupation wore on, the increasing presence of the homeless – the most vulnerable of the 99% – became the acid test of whether OWS was up to the task of heralding a new kind of society based on mutual aid. In the calendar entries of Occupy! this theme comes more and more to the fore. Indeed, Christopher Herring and Zoltán Glück's long meditation, "The Homeless Question" is worth the price of admission alone. Noting that some occupations – in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Oakland – had been more forthright in feeding and servicing the homeless, they faultlessly argue that the burgeoning unhoused population "should not be seen as a liability for the movement" (a not uncommon perception around OWS) "but a reminder of why the protest exists".

Occupying Wall Street offers a detailed rendering of how daily life was organised in the Zuccotti Park encampment. The challenge of accommodating the homeless is also part of its record of how quite different populations came to co-exist in the half-acre space. Most absorbing is the book's account of the social geography of the park, conspicuously visible in the divide between its east end, where ideological open-endedness prevailed, and the west side, or self-styled "ghetto", where the more radical groupings set up shop, along with the drum circle. As one of the westenders, a member of Class War Camp, put it, "This side of the camp isn't for reform. This side's for revolution, you know?" Unlike the east side "liberal college kids", he added, "we have nothing to lose. We don't want to fix the system, we want to fucking burn it to the ground."

Writers for the 99% (the book's collective of writers) do not shy away from pointing out that the less educated, poorer and more precarious sleepers in the "ghetto" were not only underserviced by OWS's support systems, but also lacked ready access to the resources offered by sympathetic residents of Lower Manhattan.

Such observations highlight just how difficult it is to expunge the toxic residue of race and class that poisons our existing society. For those who want Occupy to be a living, breathing alternative, every act of fellow-feeling is an opportunity to set a better norm. As many occupiers say, "the process is the product".

• Andrew Ross's Nice Work If You Can Get It is published by NYUP.