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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2015
Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu – if known at all to young Malaysians today – is remembered as a politician who was most active at the state level. He was after all the Chief Minister of Penang for 21 years, from 1969 to 1990.
However, it is far from true that his politics were not national in character. It was only that the political path that his struggles took him along after he joined politics in 1951 was one that was far from straight or predictable, and not easily described.
He was 71 years old when his electoral loss in 1990 convinced him that it was time to retire. By then, he had been in politics for 40 years. Coming from a wealthy Penang family, he showed great promise from the beginning. He performed well at Hutchings School, and moved to Penang Free School in 1932.
When he was awarded the coveted Queen's Scholarship in 1937, the Straits Times informed its readers that the 18-year-old was a “keen sportsman and cadet, holding the rank of second-lieutenant in the Free School Corps, a ‘crack rifle shot’, and was interested in history and geography”.
Following in his father's footsteps, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and when the war broke out, he served with allied troops in China as medical officer to General Chen Chen, who later became the vice-president of the Republic of China.
After the war, Dr Lim competed regularly in tennis tournaments. When the first municipal elections took place in Malaya in 1951, we saw Dr Lim leading his first political party, the Fabian-inspired Penang Radical Party, to victory in George Town. He was thus at the forefront of Penang – and national – electoral politics from the word “Go”.
In 1953, Dr Lim was the only Chinese fielded by the Radical Party, and this was in the Malay-majority seat of Jelutong. He lost badly. The Umno-MCA alliance won in all the three contested Penang municipal seats. Communal-based politics seemed to have found a formula that could gain support, at least for the time being.
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