Introduction

Abstract

I first arrived in Kuala Lumpur during Chinese New Year of 1993. The streets and highways of this modern city, lined with skyscrapers, housing estates, mosques, and shopping malls, were quiet. Stores and shops were closed, barricaded with metal gates, and padlocked. I had come to Malaysia, one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, to study entrepreneurship and the effects of rapid development among the Malays; paradoxically, my first view of Kuala Lumpur — a prosperous city built on petroleum income, foreign investment, and an enormous state-led push towards industrial capitalism — showed none of the flourishing signs of modern life it had been built to contain. To arrive during Chinese New Year threw the constructions and fitments of Malaysia’s accelerated modernity into high relief; empty of people, Kuala Lumpur looked like nothing more than a cunning architectural model — an orderly, functional design.