Wee Ka Siong

Biography

Wee Ka Siong (born 20 October 1968 in Jasin, Malacca) is the president of the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and has been the Member of Parliament for Ayer Hitam since 2004. He served as Minister of Transport from March 2020 to November 2022, across the Perikatan Nasional government of Muhyiddin Yassin and the Barisan Nasional government of Ismail Sabri Yaakob. Born into a Hakka family and raised in Tampin, Negeri Sembilan, Wee is a civil engineer by training. He studied civil engineering at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, took a master's in traffic engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and completed a doctorate in transportation planning at UTM in 2001. He is a registered engineer with the Board of Engineers Malaysia. He entered parliament in 2004 and served as Deputy Minister of Education and later as Minister in the Prime Minister's Department in Barisan Nasional governments from 2008 until the coalition's defeat in 2018. Within MCA he was youth chief from 2008, deputy president from 2013, and has been president since November 2018. Wee's position is unusual in recent Malaysian politics. In the 2018 general election he was the only MCA candidate returned to parliament, and from 2020 to 2022 he was the sole ethnic Chinese minister and the sole MCA representative in cabinet — a reflection of the collapse in the party's support that followed decades in which it was the main Chinese component of the governing coalition. As Transport Minister his tenure included the reversal of the cabotage policy exemption for foreign ships repairing undersea cables, a decision that drew sustained criticism from the technology sector.

Constituencies (1)

Electoral track record

183 mentions across 15 months

News mentions