Opinion | Criticism of China by Malaysia’s Mahathir resonates around East Asia, and with Beijing

Over the decades, China’s leaders have been known to greatly respect the tell-it-like-it-is political instincts of Malaysian maestro Dr Mahathir Mohamad. But now you have to wonder how much love may have been lost of late.

No one in Beijing or anywhere else doubts even today that the young country doctor who was to rise to prominence as the modernising leader of Malaysia is still one crazy smart Asian. Of the most remarkable figures I’ve met in a long journalistic career, Dr M – as I call him – is anything but the buttoned-up prime ministerial stereotype. Compare him, for instance, to Sir John Major, leader of the United Kingdom between 1990 and 1997 – so very much the English gentleman, dapper in tendering fair-minded and politely expressed opinion, charming even in disagreement. Dr M was – and is – nothing like that. Now 93 and prime minister of Malaysia for a second time, it is not even clear that he has mellowed much with age. Compare him to a sport and you’d have him more like Australian football than cricket.

The former boss of all bosses of the massive, money-infested monster that was Malaysia’s oft-dominant party has since become the “young insurgent” toppling that party, and Dr M’s views have new sting since becoming leader anew. His first go as prime minister ran for 22 years, the Malaysian record, ending in 2003. But way back when, at least before the September 11 terror attacks, one of Islam’s craftiest, secular political minds was all but ignored by Western journalists. Asia then was an “Oriental” story, with the Asians in the spotlight usually crazy, poor and clueless … or communist. And this Malaysian Asian was, to some, either an authoritarian crank, an anti-Semite or a bizarre Muslim Machiavelli.

That began to change in 1997, when Dr M lashed out at the International Monetary Fund, triggering regional applause. When the brutal Asian financial crisis hit, when currencies and economies from Thailand to South Korea were leaning over cliffs, and the cash-rich but cruel IMF only proffered loans with conditions reminiscent of a mafia loan shark, Dr M told the Washington-based organisation to bug off with its venomous bailout money. Instead, his government outmanoeuvred Western currency speculators, their short fangs drooling, and sent Wall Street wolves packing. (Hong Kong also out-foxed predators by working behind the scenes with premier Zhu Rongji.)

The Mahathir play got Beijing’s respect. Largely buffered from the crisis (which lasted from 1997-1999) by having pointedly ignored Washington’s ideologically pious (but Wall Street-serving) advice to lift the currency curtain and let the good times roll, the Beijing expertariat never forgot this Malay man who could say no – judging him as craftily unbeholden to the West as anyone.