HIDE 'N' SEEK

A mind-boggling 50,000 Chinese citizens - as many people as are in this music festival crowd - 'disappeared' in Malaysia this year, reports the South China Morning Post.

Those missing entered the south east Asian country as tourists, but officials have no record of them leaving.

Now police and immigration authorities have been told to find them.

This could be tricky, as 35 per cent of Malaysia's 27 million people are ethnic Chinese descended from labourers and merchants who first arrived in the 19th century.

Tensions between the indigenous Malays and the Chinese still simmer more than three decades after communal riots in 1969 left nearly two hundred dead.

Since then it's been government policy to favour Malays for university places, government jobs, cheap housing and subsidised loans because of fears that ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs were taking over the economy.

Four years earlier, ethnic violence in Singapore led to that community breaking away from the rest of Malaysia to form a mainly ethnic Chinese city state.

As recently as 1998 a series of anti-Chinese riots in neighbouring Indonesia after the toppling of its dictator Suharto, highlighted the resentment that still lingers against them.