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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2020
On the day Tun Dr. Lim Chong Eu passed away on 24 November 2010, I sat in front of Dato’ Seri Chet Singh at my then office at Penang Institute, listening to Chet reading out loud his draft eulogy for Chong Eu. I thought to myself, “We must get a book out on Chong Eu and his time.”
I was elected to Parliament representing the Penang constituency of Bukit Bendera in 2008, giving me a rare opportunity to interact with Tun Dr Lim during his final years, witnessing first hand his grand world view and his delicate political touch.
In the tide of public sentiment marking his passing, the central theme that stood out was Tun Dr Lim's role as the “Father of Modern Penang”. At the funeral, as I walked with many Penangites behind the hearse along Jalan Lim Chwee Leong, a road named after Chong Eu's father, thousands of ordinary people lined up the streets in sorrow. Comments repeatedly heard was that Chong Eu got them out of joblessness.
Chong Eu's dauntlessness and farsightedness helped engineer Penang's rebirth after the crisis of losing its Free Port status; this he did by inviting Foreign Direct Investment to build the manufacturing sector with the ultimate aim of providing decent salaries for a people troubled by a high unemployment rate. In contrast to the prevailing leftist/nationalist climate of the day, his decision to attract investment from countries symbolically regarded as imperialistic/capitalist was an audacious “Blue Ocean Strategy”. While Singapore was the regional leader, Penang quickly became the first stop for foreign investment in Malaysia.
Fifty years after that export-led industrialisation strategy which presupposed United States (and to a lesser extent Europe) as the final vi export destinations, the scenarios have probably completely changed, especially since the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, which saw growth in the US not being accompanied by much transformative job growth.
But what was central to Chong Eu's project was job creation – a theme that is still very relevant to Penang and Malaysia today.
To move his economic agenda while being constrained by an uncooperative federal bureaucracy, Chong Eu created the Penang Development Corporation (PDC) to bypass the bureaucratic hurdle of the State Secretariat, which was under federal government control.
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