Regime Adaptation Strategies

This chapter concludes my study by pulling back from a focus on the ethnic Chinese alone to take a broader view of state-level politics. It examines the Sarawak Barisan Nasional’s (SBN) strategies of adaptation following its defeats in most Chinese-majority constituencies in both the 2011 state election and the 2013 general election, during which the limits of ethno-patronage and developmentalism revealed themselves through the Sarawak United People’s Party’s (SUPP) increasingly poor performance. In particular, a resurgent discourse of Sarawak regionalism, couched in inclusive values, was articulated by the charismatic new chief minister, Adenan Satem. This chapter charts his efforts to maintain the ruling coalition’s personality-based machinery in Sibu, as a substitute for the fractured SUPP apparatus, and how it managed the rise of ideas and movements centering state autonomy in subsequent electoral contests. By focusing on the 2016 state election and 2018 general election, I study how this discursive strategy enabled the recovery of lost rural seats, but also paved the way for SBN’s component parties to reinvent themselves as an autonomous political force following regime change in 2018. It concludes by revisiting consociationalism as a political model, considering its continued relevance in an increasingly complex Malaysian political landscape.