Ironically, Lee himself would later be considered an "ultra" by the Alliance government for some of the statements he made; on May 24, 1965, Lee publicly stated: "Let us be quite frank. Why should we go back to old Singapore and once again reduce the non-Malays in Malaya to a minority?" His Malaysian Malaysia campaign was not received well either by UMNO or most of the Malays, who tended to view a Malaysian Malaysia as a "Chinese Malaysia". It has been speculated that this was due to the limited vocabulary of Malay at the time; the only Malay word for "nation" then was "bangsa", which was also synonymous with race. Since there was (and is) no "Malaysian race", it has been argued that most Malays considered anything other than a "Malay nation" as threatening to their rights. The conflict between Lee and his Chinese-majority PAP with the Malaysian government culminated in the secession of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965.