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PETALING JAYA: Well known as a fearless opposition leader for decades, Lim Kit Siang started early in going against the grain.

At 17, he scored 5As in his Cambridge School Certificate of Education examination (or Senior Cambridge as it was otherwise known). He was among a handful in the country to have achieved this.

He went on to pass the Form Six entrance examination, a prerequisite then to enter pre-university class, with flying colours. He was then admitted to the prestigious English College in Johor Bahru.

At 19, he was a top student with the world at his feet. Or so it seemed. Two months into his Form Six, Lim abruptly stopped school to marry his sweetheart – a shy classmate who he befriended at his night tuition class.

His parents were aghast and made their anger plain, but Lim stuck to his guns, ignoring his family’s pleas not to quit school and “throw away” a bright future.

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When MCA wanted DAP dissolved for the sake of Chinese unity

PETALING JAYA: It was 1971, and the chips were indeed down for the DAP. The party’s secretary-general, Lim Kit Siang, and several other key party members had just been released after being detained under the Internal Security Act for 16 months.

The political climate had changed drastically with racial tensions high after the May 13 racial riots two years earlier, and the DAP was busy warding off several attempts by its rivals to weaken the party.

One of the party’s chief existential threats, according to a book on the stalwart to be released tomorrow, was the attempt by MCA to have DAP disbanded in the wake of the MCA’s heavy losses in the 1969 general election.

MCA was the leading Chinese-based party in the Alliance, the coalition which would later become Barisan Nasional, and had lost most of its seats to the DAP.

“It was around mid-1971 and the MCA president Tan Siew Sin sent a message asking to meet Lim to discuss the political problems in the country,” according to the first volume of Lim’s biography, “Lim Kit Siang: Malaysian First, Volume One – None But the Bold”.

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