By Himanshu Bhatt.

PENANG'S longest-serving chief minister, Tun Dr Lim Chong Eu, died yesterday, leaving a legacy of having steered the state through an economic transformation that has kept escalating since the 1970s.

Lim died at home at about 9pm, surrounded by immediate family. He was 91.

Lim suffered a stroke on Oct 26 and was admitted to the Penang Hospital’s intensive care unit, where he reportedly remained in a semi-coma.

His son, Chien Aun, speaking to reporters outside the family house in Hillside, Tanjung Bungah, requested for privacy for the family.

Lim, who graduated as a doctor from the University of Edinburgh, served as Penang’s second chief minister for 21 years from 1969.

Together with Syed Hussein Alatas, he helped Gerakan win the general election in Penang soon after the state was stripped of its free port status in 1969.

Lim is best known for overseeing the emergence of Penang’s Free Trade Zone (FTZ) – later renamed Free Industrial Zone – which evolved into one of Asia’s most powerful electronics hubs.

It was here that many of the world’s top multinationals, including Intel, Hewlett-Packard, National Semiconductor, Bosch and B. Braun, set up manufacturing and research facilities.

As the founding president of Gerakan, Lim also played a key role in the party agreeing with Tunku Abdul Rahman to join the federal ruling coalition – the Alliance – which was renamed Barisan Nasional in 1973.

He also left his mark in the annals of the MCA, after he won the party president seat in 1958 by defeating Tun Tan Cheng Lock. A political crisis however ensued, culminating in him leaving the party two years later.

And in the years before and after independence in 1957, Lim was among the many figures to lend their voices to the forging of an official identity for the Malaysian nation.

“We did not have to shed much blood in the fight for our independence,” he reminisced years later. “But I can still vividly recollect the vehement arguments and debates, both intellectual and emotional, that we had to overcome in order to achieve the national unity of purpose to accept the Federal Constitution as the fundamental testament of our nationhood.”

During his political career, Lim was also briefly part of two obscure and short-lived parties -- the Radical Party and the United Democratic Party.

But it was with Gerakan that he left his most indelible mark in history, by helping the new party win Penang and then marshalling the state’s economic ascent. For by the early 1970s, Penang’s unemployment rate had spiralled downward to around 16%, a situation exacerbated by the loss of its free port status.

And it was the concept of the FTZ, pushed hard by Lim’s administration, that played a crucial role in helping to resuscitate the state, while endowing its economy with a completely fresh dimension and new character.

“That we embarked on the electronics industry was fortuitous for us,” Lim would comment later. “At that time we did not know anything about electronics.”

Other notable iconic projects that emerged during Lim’s rule included the 66-storey Komtar administrative tower and commercial complex, and the 13.5km Penang Bridge. When it was topped-off, Komtar was for some time the tallest building in Asia, and the Penang Bridge one of the longest in the world.

Lim remained chief minister until the 1990 general election, when he lost his Tanjung parliamentary seat to DAP’s Lim Kit Siang in a famously dramatic contest.

He then retired completely from politics and spent his time engaged with the business world, including as chairman of Suiwah Corporation Bhd. He was also made founding chancellor of Wawasan Open University and pro-chancellor of Universiti Sains Malaysia.

Born in Penang in 1919, Lim’s character and values during his childhood and youth were heavily shaped by his philanthropist father, Dr Lim Chwee Leong, a brilliant doctor who operated a people’s clinic on Prangin Road in George Town.

Lim also attended Southeast Asia’s oldest colonial school, the Penang Free School, where he became a King’s scholar in 1937.

Reflecting on his upbringing, he once commented: “My friends and scholastic life meant that I interacted and behaved with ease with my contemporaries, who were not family, not of the same social milieu, not of the same cultural background, not of the same religion, and not from the same ethnic stock as myself.

“I had learnt self-discipline to uphold the truth within myself. At the same time I had been taught at home how to be tolerant of others and to respect them.”

Lim was once asked at a gathering of USM students how he looked back on his role. He replied: “I subscribe to the optimism of Robert Browning -- “grow old along with me, the best is yet to be”… And I think that I am just a simple old bee that has “danced around what I thought was the best location for a hive” after 1970.

Comments (0)

Show/Hide comments

Show/Hide comment form