page_title: Malaysian Chinese
section_title: Education
hierarchical_section_title: Malaysian Chinese / Origins and social demographics / Education
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of the Co-Curricular Activity building of Tshung Tsin
context_page_description: Malaysian Chinese people or Chinese Malaysians is a local ethnic group in Malaysia. The group is defined as Malaysian citizens of Chinese ethnicity. Today, they form the second largest ethnic group after the Malay majority. Most are descendants of Southern Chinese immigrants who arrived in Malaysia between the early 19th century and the mid-20th century.
  The sub-ethnic groups of Malaysian Chinese includes Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, Teochew, Hainan, Foochow and Kwongsai. Malaysian Chinese also form the second largest community of Overseas Chinese in the world, after Thai Chinese. Within Malaysia, they represent the third largest group, constituting 23% of the Malaysian population.
  Malaysian Chinese are traditionally dominant in the business sector of the Malaysian economy. Different towns and cities in Malaysia are placed by different Chinese dialects among Chinese speakers; for example Cantonese in Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh and Sandakan, Hokkien in George Town, Klang and Kuching, Hakka in Kota Kinabalu, Teochew in Johor Bahru, Foochow in Sibu, Miri and Sitiawan, and Hainanese in Kuala Terengganu.
context_section_description: In educational aspects, Malaysia is the only country outside China and Taiwan with a comprehensive and complete Chinese education system and the only Southeast Asian country that has perpetuated the Chinese education system established since the colonial era as a result of heavy brokerage and lobbying efforts by ethnic Chinese Malaysians political leaders with continual funding from local Chinese communities. The first Chinese schools had been established in the country in the 19th century during the British colonial administration. At the same time, Christian missions from China also founded schools for Chinese students to nurture Church workers, this are most notable among many Chinese Christians of Hakka origin in Sabah and the Foochow in Sarawak. Following the country's independence, some of the Chinese independent schools who were influenced by the new national agenda and desperately needed government financial support were willingly converted into English medium-schools. However, these schools were later scrupulously converted into Malay medium-schools following the massive elimination of English medium-schools by the Malay-dominated regime in the 1970s in an effort to impose the Malay language as the only medium of instructions in all schools in the aftermath of ethnic riots in 1969. The following period was considered a dark time for local Chinese education, and witnessed a growing belief in the idea that the ethnic Chinese in Malaysia had to proceed on a basis of self-reliance and vigilance in order to preserve their language rights as the national education policy was seen as exclusionary and discriminatory for non-Malays, summed up in the aphorism "non-Malays belong to Malaysia but Malaysia only belongs to the Malays".
  Although other remaining Chinese independent schools were also included in the national school system in 1996, these independent schools still did not receive any financial assistance from the federal government and its United Examinations Certificate (UEC) is not recognised by the government, making students who finishing their studies from the local Chinese independent schools unable to enroll in government-funded public tertiary institutions. Since the late 1970, ethnic Chinese Malaysians had expanded their own Mandarin-language primary schools where around 90% of their children were enrolled based on the figures from 2006. These schools gained reputation for not only maintaining good discipline but also providing the high-quality education that the Malay schools were seen by some to lack. This perceived superiority attracted a significant interest among Bumiputera parents with various analyses placing the number of Bumiputera students enrollment in Chinese schools between 60,000–100,000 in 2000. The federal government's failure to impose Malay as the sole unifying language throughout the country's educational systems unlike in China with Standard Chinese or Indonesia with Indonesian language are mainly attributed to the racial-based policy enforcement of ethnic inclusion and exclusion. Some argue that the educational policies imposed by the federal government over the years in regard to minority language education have created negative consequences for Malaysian youth: a mounting brain drain in particular. A study from 2000 found that the country had lost an ample amount of talented and skilled youth to other more favourable countries as the result of students form the large non-Malay minority language communities being forced to go to university abroad because they did not attend Malay language schools.
caption: Co-curricular activities in Tshung Tsin Secondary School, a Chinese independent high school in Sabah.
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