CQ Journal

23/06/2026

Read Where Coherence is lost on Substack. Link in bio.

20/06/2026

This is actually a fascinating case study in something CQ Journal has been circling for a while:

The tension between cultural identity and political identity.
What makes the debate around Dear You interesting is that both sides are, in a sense, responding to different questions.

One group is asking:
"Is this film about belonging?"

The other is asking:
"Belonging to whom?"

Those sound similar, but they are not. For many overseas Chinese communities, ancestry, language, family memory and cultural traditions existed long before modern nation-states. A Sarawakian Chinese can feel a connection to ancestral villages in China while simultaneously feeling completely Sarawakian and Malaysian. The emotional connection is real. The political implication is not automatic. That distinction is where the debate sits.

The reason some commentators become cautious is because modern states increasingly understand that culture can create influence. A film, a festival, a language programme, a historical narrative; none are inherently political, but they can shape perceptions of identity over time.

At the same time, reducing every cultural expression to geopolitical strategy creates another problem. People stop being allowed to have ordinary human emotions.

A granddaughter reading her grandfather's letters.
A family visiting an ancestral village.
A community preserving a language.

These can simply be human experiences. Do modern societies still know how to hold multiple identities simultaneously.

A Sarawakian can be:

Chinese by ancestry
Sarawakian by culture
Malaysian by citizenship
ASEAN by geography
Global by profession

Without experiencing any contradiction. The modern internet often struggles with this. Algorithms prefer binary categories:

loyal or disloyal
local or foreign
nationalist or cosmopolitan

Reality is usually messier.

In many ways, the film debate is not really about China. It is about whether people believe cultural memory must eventually become political allegiance. Some say yes. Others say no.

The most mature societies tend to recognise that identity operates in layers:

Citizenship determines political belonging.
Culture shapes memory and meaning.
The two influence each other, but they are not identical.

That is why the same film can be viewed as a family story by one audience and a geopolitical signal by another. The film itself may not have changed. The lens did.

17/06/2026

Public Holiday Thought

A former Prime Minister said Malaysians no longer feel protected by the law.

Whether you agree with him or not is not the point. What caught my attention was how quickly many people responded by talking about him rather than what he was saying.

“Look who’s talking.”
“He’s part of the problem.”
“Didn’t he do the same thing?”

Perhaps.
History matters.
But there is a something else worth asking.

What happens when every public statement is evaluated based on the speaker before it is evaluated based on its truth?

At that point, we stop asking:
“Is this happening?”
And start asking:
“Am I allowed to agree with this person?”

Those are very different questions. Because if confidence in institutions is genuinely declining, it remains a problem regardless of who points it out.

And if confidence is not declining, then we should be able to explain why. Either way, the discussion should be about the condition itself.

Not merely the messenger.

The irony is that many of the comments may have unintentionally illustrated the very issue being discussed.

Nobody wanted to talk about trust.
Everyone wanted to talk about tribes.

Maybe that is one of the reasons trust is becoming harder to maintain in the first place.

17/06/2026

Ordinary people see headlines.

Political veterans see behaviour.

16/06/2026

16/06/2026

Much of Sarawak’s leadership messaging lately has been less:

“Forget today’s problems and focus on the future.”

and more:

“Build the conditions that make the future possible.”

Energy.
Connectivity.
Air transport.
Education.
Digital infrastructure.
Regional integration.
Borneo Grid.

That's because they create capacity. Capacity is what eventually pays for healthcare, schools, roads and social programmes.

As for Anwar himself?

Many people feel he is strongest as a narrator of possibilities. He can paint a future. He can connect ideas. He can inspire.

The question voters keep asking is:

Can he convert narrative into institutions?

That is ultimately how history judges leaders.

Not by the speech.

By whether the conditions they described actually came into existence.

And perhaps that’s the irony.

The most political question about AI is not AI at all.

It’s whether citizens TRUST the people asking them to focus on it.

Anwar urges focus on AI, not politics.