The former health minister, who was sacked by the Malay nationalist party in January this year for sabotaging his own party during the Nov 2022 general election, was trying to steal the thunder from the Speaker of Lower House – Johari Abdul – who urged Malaysian students in China to return home upon graduation to help develop the country. But why should they?

Apparently, the Speaker told the students, all of whom are ethnic Chinese at the prestigious Tsinghua University, to learn as much as possible from China before returning to contribute to their homeland. Crucially, he told all the students to come back not to start looking for jobs, but to lead the country as well as to become entrepreneurs and use their connections to develop Malaysia.

Does Speaker Johari know the reasons those students left Malaysia to study in Tsinghua in the first place? Does he know that Tsinghua is known as “China’s MIT”? Heck, did he even realize that most of the Malaysian students accepted into Tsinghua were top scorers of UEC examination, the same Unified Examination Certificate that the Government of Malaysia refuses to recognize for decades?

Yes, Tsinghua is one of China’s top schools for studying sciences. Ranked 18th by the Times Higher Education as the world’s top-20 schools, the university has been producing top brains, ranging from Nobel laureates to tech innovators and from esteemed diplomats to global leaders. It was ranked 2nd best place in the world to study Material Science and 4th to study Electronic and Electrical Engineering.

Tsinghua and Peking University are like China’s Oxford and Cambridge, competing with each other in research. In fact, Tsinghua produced more of the top 1% most highly cited papers in maths and computing, and more of the 10% most highly cited papers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), than any other university in the world.

Current Chinese president Xi Jinping and his predecessor Hu Jintao were graduates of Tsinghua. And there are thousands of brilliant Tsinghua graduates being hired by Huawei Technologies Co. (they have more than 100,000 employees in R&D, mind you), the tech giant which recently stunned the U.S. with the introduction of Huawei Mate 60 Pro phones powered by 7-nanometre chip.

Mr Khairy said top brains have left not only due to higher salaries being offered abroad, but also because of other factors. He mentioned bureaucracy for local talents to kick-start their business or outdated local market in supporting sophisticated products. He acknowledged the 500-pound gorilla in the room – “second-class citizens” treatment of non-Bumiputeras.

He was probably referring to Grab, originally known as “My Teksi”, which was first started by Harvard graduate Anthony Tan in Malaysia in 2012. Thanks to bureaucracy and regulatory issues in doing business in the country, Anthony and his co-founder Malaysian internet entrepreneur, Tan Hooi Ling, another Harvard graduate, moved the company headquarters from Malaysia to Singapore.

Grab had tried to apply for financial grants from Khazanah Nasional, the sovereign wealth fund of the Government of Malaysia. But the long process and Khazanah’s disagreement to the deal saw Singapore investment fund Temasek quickly grabbed the opportunity and pumped US$10 million into Grab in 2014 – an example of how businesses and Malaysian talents are lost to foreign countries.

However, Khairy cunningly refused to link the root problem to “Ketuanan Melayu” – the ideology of Malay supremacy espoused by the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), which he was part of till he was fired. The racist and discrimination policy saw brain drain in the form of hundreds of thousands of technical skills went through a large scale migration to other countries.

Not only the racist policy caused the brain drain at an industrial scale, but it also spooks both foreign and domestic investors. Years before Malaysian internet entrepreneur Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling founded Grab and migrated to Singapore, “Sugar King” Robert Kuok and gaming giant Genting Berhad had already moved their business head office to Hong Kong and Singapore respectively.

It becomes worse when the NEP (New Economic Policy), a discrimination and racist policy derived from the “Ketuanan Melayu”, was quietly upgraded by greedy and parasite Malay elites to rob the businesses belonging to minorities Chinese and Indian – from 30% to 51% stake – under the pretext that the Malays or Bumiputeras were still poor and needed to be given equities without lifting a finger.