Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has defended Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng over the flak which the latter received for issuing a statement in Chinese. Lim defended the move by his team to issue trilingual statements when he addressed the Tun Razak Exchange issue on Thursday, which included Malay, English and Chinese. However, the Facebook statement he issued on Sunday to defend the trilingual statement was done purely in Chinese, eliciting a barrage of negative reactions from those who could not understand and had to rely on the social media platform’s translation tool, Malaysia Kini reports. Racially charged rhetoric has characterised politics in this multi-ethnic and multi-religious country ever since its independence from Britain more than 50 years ago, writes Tashny Sukumaran for South China Morning Post.