opinion MCA Youth chief Ong Tee Keat is reported to have resorted to publishing his own broadsheets to make his voice heard in his crusade against MCA president Dr Ling Liong Sik. Ong is the deputy minister for youth, sports and culture, while Ling is transport minister.

And as expected, Ong has been under heavy fire from some 'loyal veterans' of the mono-ethnic party founded in 1949 (MCA started off as a welfare organisation that sold gambling lotteries which was later banned by the colonial British administration in 1953).

Ong has been accused of being 'intellectually arrogant', 'ungrateful' and 'disobedient'. But he has been counter-attacking them with admirable valour and remarkable fortitude.

Ong is certainly a great debater and a masterly user of the Chinese language, besides being a fluent speaker of Bahasa Malaysia.

An engineering graduate from University Malaya, Ong also writes poems, short stories, and commentaries in the Chinese-language. Thus, in terms of his image within the Chinese-speaking community, Ong is certainly culturally and intellectually more qualified than the military college graduate (Ling) who masters no cultural languages.

However, politics in MCA, as in Umno and MIC, is not about culture and intellect it is about power and money. With money, one can, like Ling, buy up newspapers and order their editors to childishly silence others, or not to publish their articles and photographs.

Bangsa Malaysia

There are some Malaysians who still believe that the more someone appears in the mainstream or established newspapers, the more 'powerful', 'intelligent' and 'cultured' they are. MCA president Ling appears to believe there are many such people.

Thus, soon after Ong's interview appeared in the youth supplement of the MCA-owned Nanyang Siang Pau, the supplement was dropped. In that interview, Ong spoke on sports and the need to keep fit.

A few weeks earlier, anotherNanyang supplement - the Saloon - was also suddenly scraped after this writer was interviewed. The writer spoke on the needs for Chinese Malaysians to be more sociable and less isolationist, and to empathise with the plights and sentiments of other ethnic communities like the Malays and Indians.

What is wrong with Ong telling Chinese Malaysians to maintain physical fitness and health? What is wrong with this writer helping to convince Chinese to be have a more Malaysian outlook? Didn't Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad himself advocate the creation of a Bangsa Malaysia with a more liberated psychology? Is it wrong to help Mahathir to fullfil the dream of a united Bangsa Malaysia?

Is the Ling-MCA's secret agenda to segregate Chinese from the multi-ethnic and multi-religious mainstream discourses. Why? So that his faction could forever manipulate the fear and hope of the Chinese of living in 'a sea of Mad Mullahs and the Malay Mobs'?

Blacklisted

Such is the sad state of affairs in the MCA-controlled Chinese-language newspapers like Nanyang Siang Pau today. The victims are not just Ong and this writer, but hundreds of other blacklisted writers like Chinese educationist Lee Ban Chen, who is also a Bahasa Malaysia and English columnist in malaysiakini.

However, as most of us are also readers in Bahasa Malaysa and English, the MCA strategy will fail because there are many outlets for our ideas now in the world of information technology.

In the past, a monolingual Chinese writer, once blacklisted by Chinese-language newspapers, would probably end up as a frustrated hawker selling Hokkien fried noodles. But now the more they apply such outmoded strategy, the more Chinese youths would turn to BBC and CNN for international news, intelligent opinions and expertly analyses. They too can turn to malaysiakini, Agenda Daily and radiqradio for domestic news.

Buyers' market

In a regional seminar on the future and challenges of the Chinese-language newspapers held in Kuala Lumpur a few weeks ago, a senior editor warned that Chinese-language newspapers have now to compete with the English media as more and more Chinese are bilingual and cosmopolitan.

In other words, the media competition now cutting across languages. The days of language and information monopoly for a specific ethnic community is over.

Chinese in Malaysia are constantly searching for intellectual and moral progress, and this search could only be provided by free and independent media, not the propaganda broadsheets that serve only partisan interests of one party or one political faction.

For those in the MCA and its business circle, who can only operate within the monetary paradigm, let them be reminded that it is now a buyers', not sellers', market.

JAMES WONG WING ON is chief analyst of Strategic Analysis Malaysia (SAM) which produces the subscriber-based political report, Analysis Malaysia. James is a former member of parliament (1990-1995) and a former columnist for the Sin Chew Jit Poh Chinese daily. He read political science and economics at the Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. While in Sin Chew, he and a team of journalists won the top awards of Malaysian Press Institute (MPI) for 1998 and 1999.