Kota Kinabalu: Prominent global finance commentator Tan Sri Andrew Sheng said strong cooperation is needed to rebuild trust across religions, races and civilisations, adding that the stakes extend to global peace and the environment.
“We are today in a world of gross mistrust. Mistrust across religion, mistrust across race, mistrust across civilisation,” said the Wawasan Open University, George Town Institute of Open and Advanced Studies Chairman.
“The answer is that if we do not live together, we will go into nuclear annihilation,” he said, adding that climate change posed an equally serious threat if humanity continued to damage the natural environment.
He said this at the Opening Forum on East-West Multi-Faith Partnership for Human Dignity, part of a roundtable discussion on multi-faith partnership in praxis for human dignity and flourishing held at the Pacific Sutera here on Tuesday.
He joined the roundtable discussion via an online link, having attended a separate conference on sustainable development at the same venue only two weeks earlier.
For the record, Sheng, a former central banker and financial regulator whose career has spanned major financial institutions across Asia, is widely regarded as a leading commentator on global finance.
He also holds positions as a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Global Institute, University of Hong Kong, a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Capital Market Research Malaysia, and Chairman of the Wawasan Education Foundation.
He said trust between communities could only be rebuilt through consistent action rather than words alone, drawing on lessons from his years managing financial crises as a central banker.
“Trust is only built by action. If you only talk but you do not walk, people do not trust you,” he said.
“When you cannot take your money from the bank, everybody runs to take money from the bank and the bank collapses,” he said, pointing out that banking crises were themselves a breakdown of trust.
He said universities and schools were best positioned to scale up conversations on human dignity and shared responsibility into lasting institutional change, particularly as societies adapt to new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence.
“If this conversation cannot be scaled, it will be meaningless,” he said.
“We must scale this in a way, and the platform that will scale this, the answer must be universities and the schooling system,” he said.
He said Southeast Asia’s history of absorbing different religious and cultural influences, from indigenous beliefs to Buddhism, Islam and Christianity, showed that diverse communities could coexist without requiring uniformity.
He compared this to the traditional Ikat weaving, a craft he and his wife have long collected, noting that different threads become stronger once woven together.
“The minute they are woven together, they are stronger than every single thread,” he said.
He said this principle of entanglement, where different traditions and practices reinforce one another, offered a richer path forward than division.
He pointed out that multi-faith conversations remained the ultimate test of whether societies could sustain long-term trust.
“Multi-faith conversations are the ultimate test of the ability to have a sustainable and long-term faith in our future, because faith begins by trusting and working with each other,” he said.
