5
Colonial Asia was now a connected arc of protest. Everywhere local nationalists borrowed the words and emulated the deeds of neighbours, and the language of the Atlantic Charter and the San Francisco Declaration became a common tongue for all. In early 1946 Indonesia’s struggle was first raised in the United Nations, and this made it a test case for the rights of fledgling nations everywhere. In British Asia, nationalists followed events in Indo-China and Indonesia as if their own future were being decided, which it effectively was. In Malaya the cause of the Indonesian republic captivated not only the Malays, who felt tied to it by kinship and language, but the whole of Malayan society, whose trade unions, youth and women’s movements all took up its slogans. The Chinese population caught up in the fighting in Semarang and Surabaya appealed directly to the community in Malaya, and many fled there as refugees. Harold Laski’s campaigning articles from Reynolds News were immediately translated into the Tamil newspapers in Singapore. They were united in their opposition to the use of Indian troops, stating, ‘We [the British] have no business in Java.’1This larger ‘we’ was reinforced by the British servicemen in Singapore – corporals mostly, it seems – who wrote polemical articles for publication in the vernacular press. Surabaya was a turning point for everyone: the British argument that force was necessary to bring a large Asian rebel army to heel seemed to be a harbinger of a new Armageddon. ‘Battle for Surabaya’, announced the New Democracy in banner headlines. ‘Cause of a Third World War?’2 Would this, the campaigning Malay newspaper Utusan Melayu speculated, ‘become a strong argument to use the atomic bomb on the Indonesians whose only sin is to attain their independence?’3
The battle of Surabaya was fought in unlikely places. Southeast Asian students in Japan demonstrated on the streets of Tokyo. In a bizarre twist of fate, many of the most hardened veterans of anti-Dutch resistance were to be found in Australia. Japan had failed to occupy the Dutch territories of the island of New Guinea, and in mid 1943, Charles van der Plas, then the senior Dutch official in Australia, secretly moved 507 exiles and their families from the Boven Digul isolation colony to Bowen and Sydney, where they were placed in a guarded camp together with Axis internees. Many were members of the Partai Komunis Indonesia, imprisoned after the uprisings of 1926–7, including Sarjono, the party’s former chairman. The Digul families were the first convicts to land in New South Wales for over a century, and when two notes dropped by Indonesians at the quayside and on a train platform were picked up by Australian workers, their plight attracted wide sympathy. The exiles were released and, notwithstanding the ‘white Australia’ policy then in force, were assimilated into the Australian workforce. They included graduates and skilled craftsmen, and such was the Dutch military’s own desperation for personnel that some of them even found employment with the government-in-exile. But biding their time, the Indonesians organized, formed strong links with the Australian left and in 1944 set up their own independence committees. When Japan surrendered there was a wave of strikes by Indonesian seamen who refused to return to pre-war conditions of employment. In six days after 24 September, 1,400 of them came ashore. When Indian workers were drafted in as replacements, they joined the strikers. The Dutch, desperate to ship men and materials to Java, were thrown into panic.4 As ex-detainees began to resign from Dutch service they were arrested as illegal immigrants by the Dutch authorities, who prepared to send them back to Digul camp. This was an extraordinary use of their extra-territorial privileges. By April 1946 820 Indonesian mariners and soldiers were interned in Australian jails.5 The Australian unions joined the protest, declared that ‘everything Dutch is black’ and boycotted Dutch ships. On 11 November at Morton Bay there was a mutiny on a RN auxiliary vessel at Woolloomooloo. The sailors draped slogans on their ship: ‘Food for Britain before troops for Java’. The Australian government’s decision to repatriate some exiles and their families (which now included some Australian Aboriginal wives) in October 1945 inflamed the controversy. The Dutch were unwilling to have so many seasoned radicals land, and wanted to take them into custody. Mountbatten felt unable to guarantee their safety. But many evaded capture and, in the event, only nineteen ‘extremists’ and eight of their family members were despatched on the Esperance Bay and landed at Kupang in Timor. They took with them a large Indonesian flag, embroidered with the words, ‘To Dr Soekarno from Queensland Trade Unionists’.6
The Vietnamese and Indonesian revolutions drew upon networks of support across the region. Bangkok was a huge arms bazaar, stocked by supplies from surrendered Japanese garrisons and from SEAC’s airdrops to the Free Thai resistance. ‘Buying arms in Thailand’, the veteran southern Vietnamese revolutionary Tran Van Giau joked, ‘was as easy as buying beer’. The Filipinos and Burmese also offloaded guns onto the Thai market, and Chinese, Swedes, Czechs and Americans – idealists, freebooters and demobbed special forces – all got involved in the trade. Jim Thompson, a Princeton-educated ex-OSS man, invested his profits in a silk business that still bears his name.7 Vietnamese exiles in Singapore tried to recruit fighters from Malaya, and they approached the Malayan Communist Party for 500 guns from its secret stockpile in Johore. It became impossible to ship them by junk to Cochin China, but the contacts were important in other ways: through them, Chin Peng and others began to learn more about the secret lives of Lai Teck.8 Malaya was the armoury of the Indonesian republic. The British dumped as many as 2,000 tons of surplus arms at sea south of Singapore, and they easily found their way into Indonesia through the Riau islands. The first major republican supply operation was orchestrated in September 1946, by a Chinese lawyer, Captain Joe Loh, who had served in Force 136. He used his British connections to acquire – with no advance payment – 1,400 Lee Enfield rifles, six anti-aircraft guns, a field hospital, a field kitchen and army clothing, and ran them past the Dutch navy to the republican forces in Java on a wooden vessel called the Mariam Bee. This was enough to equip a battalion: the goods were marked in the log at the Changi naval base as ‘One lot of surplus goods dumped and destroyed.’9 In Pekanbaru, on the Sumatran mainland, some 1,000 republican soldiers paraded in British uniforms. This caused real confusion when they then attacked a nearby Dutch garrison.10
Chinese intermediaries dominated the arms trade. In Indonesia, although the community was precariously placed, and often targeted for attack by nationalist mobs, businessmen borrowed the authority of political organizations as a shield, and used it to seize the lucrative import–export trade from European firms. When the Dutch navy intervened to stop this illicit trade, Singapore merchants and trade unions united in their attacks on Dutch ‘piracy’. Tan Kah Kee, who had spent the war hidden in exile in Java, used his influence to strengthen sentiment in favour of the revolution, and this very quickly developed into an attack on local British authority. When, in early 1946, the BMA in Malaya banned the use of sugar in coffee-shops because of shortages, the connection was immediate: ‘Java produces sugar. Let the British armies leave Java and allow it independence then sugar will be plentiful.’11 Sweeping boycotts of Dutch shipping and trade were launched. Although Overseas Chinese politics never achieved the cohesion and purpose it possessed in the anti-Japanese movement before the war, it still remained a force to be reckoned with.
The cause of Indonesia was kept alive in Malaya by the presence of the 15,000 Dutch soldiers and ex-internees who were based in Singapore by the end of 1945, and some 2,000 more upcountry.12 The refugees were traumatized and bitter: they were the first of some 300,000 lost children of empire who would travel into exile in the Netherlands, and then on to the United States or Australia.13 As SEAC prepared to wind up its operations by the end of November 1946, the Dutch shipped in 75,000 men to keep order in Java and Sumatra, and many of them came through Singapore. Eventually, over 140,000 Dutch were mobilized for De Grote Oost–an extraordinary commitment for a nation that had a population of only 1,750,000 men of military age – and there were Dutch camps in Malaya until 1948.14 The main civilian settlement in Singapore, Wilhelmina Camp, was a substantial township with its own radio station, cinema and orchestra. But it was adjacent to the Malay settlement of Geylang, and in mid 1946, as Dutch operations intensified in Indonesia, there were Dutch–Malay clashes in the neutral ground between the two areas: the Happy World amusement park. There was fighting in its bars, cabarets and even at the Bolero Malay Opera. An NCO, his wife and another Dutchman were killed. Tensions between Menadonese and Amboinese troops and local Malays nearly escalated out of control, as the Malays threatened to call in compatriots in the services to ‘stage a real battle’. The violence was usually triggered by soldiers’ improper conduct towards respectable Malay women, although Dutch intelligence suggested that its origins were political, and that it was orchestrated by local Indonesians.15 Dutch agents were at work across Malaya; Mustapha Hussain was approached by a European and offered $1,000 a month to spy on ‘pro-Indonesia’ supporters in Perak.16
In this way Indonesia’s struggle became part of the daily lives of Malays. Geylang was a place of transit for many refugees; it was also close to the camps of romusha labourers. It was a crowded and volatile world – poor Indonesians were still dying on the streets – but compared with Java it was a safe haven. One of the first political organizations to be founded in post-war Malaya was an Indonesian Labour Party, that worked to organize and repatriate the labourers. It set up an office in the Arab Street area, near the palace of the last, exiled ruler of the Johor-Riau empire that had once held sway across the colonial borders of the region. There was a short-lived attempt to revive the sultanate, and Singapore remained a symbolic centre of the entire Malay world: a crossroads for traders and craftsmen, scholars and writers, religious teachers and pilgrims, especially after the hajj to Mecca began to revive. With the arrival of Mountbatten Singapore became an important diplomatic centre and home to the Republic of Indonesia’s main external office.17 One of the many arrivals in 1946 was the 27-year-old Khatijah Sidek, a spirited, independent Minangkabau woman, educated at Padang Panjang in western Sumatra, a dynamic centre of modernist Islamic learning. She was one of the leaders of the controversial Puteri Kesatri, the women fighters of the revolution, who had challenged traditional roles in a dramatic way. On the prompting of exiles from Malaya, Khatijah decided to take her message of emancipation to Singapore. She arrived without funds but, with the help of local associations, travelled around Malaya lecturing to women of all communities, from the wives of the urban elite to peasant women in the Malay kampongs. The British were becoming increasingly alarmed by the activities of such people. ‘Whenever we made a speech’, Khatijah wrote, ‘the police and the Special Branch were there too, and the Malay people themselves advised us not to make our speeches too strong or too “hot” because Malaya was different from Indonesia; and it was not only the common people who advised us thus, but also the leaders… in those days they were very afraid to hear the word Merdeka, which we from Indonesia spoke of constantly.’18
But it was a two-way traffic. Many Malay radicals travelled to Indonesia and fought in the revolution, and what the British now began to describe obsessively as ‘Indonesian influence’ was often an expression of a local vision of a greater Malay nation.19 Young leaders such as Ahmad Boestamam cultivated the pemuda style. Malay orators took Sukarno as a model – ‘that Ox and Lion of the Indonesian podium’ – although Boestamam himself, perhaps the most effective platform speaker of his generation, claimed that his greatest inspiration was Subhas Chandra Bose.20 On 17 February 1946, the six-month anniversary of the Indonesian revolution, Boestamam founded the Angkatan Pemuda Insaf – the Generation of Aware Youth. It was known – as were many Malay associations in this period – by its dramatic acronym, API, which meant ‘fire’. Within the space of a few days he and his friends assembled around 500 young Malays, many of whom had received Japanese basic military training, and paraded at Jubilee Park, Ipoh, in red and white armbands that mirrored the Sang Saka Merah Putih flag of Indonesia. Although it kept its separate identity, API became the youth wing of the Malay Nationalist Party, and supplied many of its activists. The MNP was now a national force. Shortly after the foundation of API it moved its office to a shophouse in Batu Road, Kuala Lumpur, and the young radicals began to live in a communal fashion in a rented house in nearby Kampong Bahru which became known as ‘Hotel Merdeka’. Here they were joined by a young woman from Negri Sembilan, Shamsiah Fakeh, another graduate of a religious school, who slept next to the stove and took over the women’s section of the party. She created a sister organization to API: the Angkatan Wanita Sedar – Generation of Aware Women – or AWAS, ‘look out!’ With this cry, its members would raise their clenched right fist with the index finger extended as a warning sign. The women goaded the men, and encouraged wives of non-politically minded husbands to go on strike from their domestic duties.21
The Malay Nationalist Party also began to attract the support of leading Malay intellectuals of an older, pre-pemuda generation. Mockhtaruddin Lasso, a shadowy figure to the end, disappeared suddenly in early 1946, and little other than rumour was heard of him again. The new chairman, Dr Burhanuddin al-Helmy, was forty-five years of age; he had been schooled at the Penang madrasah of the great Malay modernist reformer Syed Sheihk al-Hadi, and then spent a long sojourn in India, training in homoeopathic medicine at Ismaileah Medical College in Hyderabad, and the Anglo-Muslim College at Aligarh. In India, he had met Jinnah, and became very interested in the cause of Palestine.22 ‘Pak Doktor’, as he was dubbed, possessed an Islamic cosmopolitanism that was unequalled among Malay political leaders, and his nationalism was religiously grounded. Within the MNP different traditions of radical thought were beginning to assemble under the same banner. Malay cadres of the Malayan Communist Party were also regular visitors to ‘Hotel Merdeka’. The most prominent of these were two Perak Malays, Rashid Maidin and Abdullah Che Dat. Rashid, aged twenty-eight, had worked for a mining company as an electrical technician whilst taking a correspondence course in English. He had been recruited into the MCP by Tu Lung Shan, Chin Peng and Eng Ming Chin’s mentor, and had worked as an underground publicist during the war. The 23-year-old Abdullah C.D., as he was known in the party, had attended Clifford School, an English school in Kuala Kangsar. He had been a member of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda but left the movement in protest at its cooperation with the Japanese and instead worked among the Malays for the MPAJA. In the dark days of communal violence, Rashid Maidin and Abdullah C.D. toured the Perak river with Eng Ming Chin’s propaganda troupe to allay Malay fears and broker local understandings. Over the next two years the communists would invest a tremendous amount in the Malay Nationalist Party: it symbolized its growing commitment to ‘Malayanization’ and substantiated its claim to patriotism. In the MNP, Abdullah later wrote, there were ‘branches of many aliran [flows of consciousness] – nationalist, religious, socialist, communist. Yet by taking our aliran out of the equation, we were able to set aside differences, able to unite and cooperate. This was for the sake of a patriotic front that was anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist and loving independence, freedom.’23
The first weeks of 1946 were a period of unprecedented political freedom and experiment that would later become known as the Malayan Spring. The phrase was coined by Han Suyin, a novelist who came to Malaya in 1952. She calculated that around fourteen books of poetry, ninety-six novels – a new form in Malayan Chinese literature – and forty-eight books of essays appeared in Chinese in this period, though by the time of her arrival six years later the parameters of open public debate had shrunk dramatically. To her eyes, intellectual life seemed to have been obliterated entirely, and ‘Special Branch was The Power’. She found that much that had been written in the immediate post-war years was no longer available; the authors could not be traced or, if they could, denied that they had ever written anything.24 But at the time the Malayan Spring was a significant shift in mood, and perhaps more enduring than Han Suyin realized. One writer, styling himself ‘Fu-sheng’, or ‘Revival’, described the change in an essay in New Democracy that marked the fourth anniversary of the Japanese invasion of Malaya, or ‘Twelve-Eight’, as it was now called. Before the war, he wrote, the Chinese in Malaya were ‘just an overseas Chinese and nothing more’.
Then the British lost Malaya in just two months and a week, and the duty of beating the Japanese and regaining Malaya fell on the Malayan people, especially on us Chinese. And so Malaya was reborn thanks to the blood of the Chinese and other revolutionary warriors. The fates of Malaya and our mother country are related. We fight for Malaya and our mother country, while the people of our mother country fight for the country and for Malaya. The mother country is ours, but in Malaya also we have our share. There is a testimony of blood which no one can gainsay.
The local landscape was now poignant with memory; the local situation a microcosm of Asian history and current politics. In the past, Fu-sheng wrote, three races – China, India and Indonesia – had ruled half the globe and now they came together in Malaya. The ‘three big races’ of Malaya – the Chinese, Indians and Malays – were like the three Great Powers at Yalta. They had a shared destiny. ‘Peace is indivisible; so is the fate of Malaya, China, India and Indonesia.’25 Whilst Chinese writing in Malaya tended to claim a leading role for the Chinese in the political struggle in Malaya – for Chinese rights as ‘pioneers’ – it remained divided on how far this struggle was for Malaya. But through the prism of the resistance struggle, Chinese writers and intellectuals explored their surroundings with a new emotion and purpose, and debates on identity and emancipation were conducted with a new urgency.
One of the key figures in this revival was the writer and journalist Hu Yuzhi. Educated in Paris and a leading luminary of the Shanghai intellectual scene, he had, along with many other ‘refugee writers’, fled from China to Singapore in 1940. This influx of sophisticates was a minor revolution in a society that for the most part comprised labourers and traders, and, for their part, the writers saw the Nanyang as an artistic utopia. Hu Yuzhi later admitted that he was secretly a member of the Chinese Communist Party sent to Singapore to intensify propaganda work in the Nanyang. He spent the war in hiding in Sumatra, running a wine-brewing factory with a fellow-exile, the celebrated modernist novelist and poet Yu Dafu. Yu was killed by the Japanese in the interregnum: he was witness to too many of their brutalities. This loss would haunt Chinese writing in Malaya after the war, and writers composed multiple laments for his passing. Hu Yuzhi – ‘a little homunculus of a man with bright eyes like a marmoset’, wrote Victor Purcell – returned to Singapore to work with Tan Kah Kee to build unity among the local Chinese.26 He edited the most prominent literary magazine, Feng Hsia (Land Below the Wind), which ran to 132 issues between December 1945 and June 1948, and achieved an unprecedented quality of output. Hu Yuzhi’s wife, Shen Zijiu, published Malaya’s first journal for women, New Woman, and many newspapers now began to carry literary supplements. Hu Yuzhi became a vocal critic of the Malayan Communist Party’s propaganda: he felt it lacked power and depth. The people were in a state of ‘semifeudal towkay-ism’. Bosses controlled the newspapers, would-be intellectuals such as students became clerks and were ‘shoved into a shop’; teachers became ‘mere wage-earners’.27‘We do not require tanks, guns and hand-grenades now,’ wrote Hu Yuzhi. ‘Our weapons are pen and paper only.’ The struggle was against a ‘servile culture’. The problem was ‘thinking too highly of foreigners and belittling ourselves. This is a common psychological phenomenon among the Malayan people. It needs to be conquered, because it makes it easy for the rule of imperialism.’28 This touched upon a nagging difficulty for the Malayan Communist Party. After its losses to the Japanese in the war, it lacked experienced and educated leaders; Chin Peng’s schooling had ended when he was fifteen years of age, and in this he was not exceptional. To broaden its support, the leftist movement began to cultivate the intelligentsia.
The war made anti-imperialists out of British rule’s natural supporters, the very middle-class ‘Malayans’ the British hoped to cultivate. For them a defining issue was ‘back pay’ for civil servants. After the liberation, the Europeans in Changi and Sime Road were quietly paid the thousands of dollars in salary they had accrued over three and a half years; they were given 90 per cent of it in cash before being repatriated, and even a generous clothing allowance to replace their wardrobes. This ‘internment bounty’ incensed Asian civil servants, who, although they had not been incarcerated, had been singled out for pay cuts and persecution by the Kempeitai. For them, ‘Singapore was one large prison camp’. For the first time, the middle classes marched in protest. They were eventually made a raised offer of three and a half months’ pay, but the damage was done.29 As one former student at Singapore’s elite Raffles College observed: ‘My education in the unfairness and absurdities of human existence was completed by what I saw in the immediate aftermath of the war. If three and a half years of Japanese occupation had earned me my degree in the realities of life, the first year in liberated Singapore was my postgraduate course.’ The young Lee Kuan Yew would soon sail for England to complete his formal education at Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge. He would return to dominate the island’s politics for over fifty years. The attitude of his generation of colonial students would be dramatically different from an earlier elite generation who had returned, in Lee’s words, ‘overawed and overwhelmed by English values’.30
The ‘English-speaking brain-workers’, as they termed themselves, now began to organize, and a circle of them established Singapore’s first political party, the Malayan Democratic Union, in December 1945. The MDU included some of the most privileged young Malayans. Its first secretary, Lim Hong Bee, was educated at Cambridge on a King’s Scholarship, together with another member of the party, Lim Kean Chye, a son of one of the oldest and most illustrious Straits Chinese families of Penang. An older London-trained lawyer, the Guyana-born Eurasian Chinese Philip Hoalim, was chairman, and his money seemed to keep the small party afloat. The Malayan Democratic Union set up an office above the Liberty Cabaret in New Bridge Road, and the dance floor became a setting for political debate.31 The intellectuals’ vision of ‘Malaya’ was formed out of the cosmopolitan urban world of Singapore. It was inclusive and internationalist. Its manifesto announced that the MDU did ‘not take the stand that Malaya should break away from Great Britain. Indeed, Malaya with full democratic self-government will benefit most if she remains within the British Commonweath…’32 This was, by the standards of the time, a very moderate platform. But it attracted little sympathy from the British. Many of the Union’s leaders, including its most well-known figure, the lawyer John Eber, came from the Eurasian community, and they were subjected to condescending racial prejudice. Eber’s anti-colonialism, it was muttered, was grounded in resentment that while his English mother could mix with the colonial elite, his Eurasian father could not. But Eber had been largely brought up by his mother’s relatives in England, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and on returning to Singapore had joined the exclusive Tanglin Club and Singapore Golf Club. As his friend and fellow Cambridge graduate Lim Hong Bee put it, he was ‘in no way seen to display any of the obsessional traits of inferiority… He had no need to.’ The British reaction to him was pathological and hostile, Lim suggested, because Eber was ‘an acute embarrassment – so much like them in form, yet so different in substance’.33
The leaders of the Malayan Democratic Union were inspired by a socialist critique of imperialism. They argued that the British had created communal tensions in Malaya by building up the non-Malays as middlemen, and they looked to overcome this by a programme of nationalization and rural development. A central concern was to develop a system of ‘social security’ on the New Zealand model. In education, they looked beyond their own anglophone bias to the creation of four national language streams; the Malayan Democratic Union’s newspaper, The Democrat, gave unprecedented coverage to Malay affairs and to the Malay Nationalist Party. Again, and as Victor Purcell later admitted, this was no more dangerous than the socialism of Sutan Sjahrir or Aung San, but the party’s relations with the British were distorted entirely by its relationship with the MCP. The Malayan Democratic Union was never an organized political party as such; most of its 300 ‘members’ were civil servants and its leaders were acutely aware of their need to reach out to the masses, but also of the obstacles to them doing so. They shared the Liberty Cabaret with a consumers’ co-operative society, which was an important means of local self-help during the economic crisis. Eber built up his political reputation by working for them and for trade unions as a legal adviser. He was active in the back-pay issue and, as a senior local lawyer, was prepared to be co-opted to government committees. But Eber and the other leaders saw co-operation with the communists as their route to the masses. The MCP’s open leader in Singapore, Wu Tian Wang, attended the inauguration of the MDU on 19 January 1946, the same ceremony at which a Friends of Indonesia Association was founded. The MDU’s organizing secretary, Gerald de Cruz, was a Party member, and Lim Hong Bee, who returned to the United Kingdom at the end of the year, would act as its unofficial roving representative overseas. One of the MDU’s most gifted figures was Eu Chooi Yip, a bilingual writer whom Hu Yuzhi singled out for praise ‘as a scholar and as a writer of the modern school’. He had worked for the Chinese Protectorate and as a government inspector of mines and possessed a formidable knowledge of the labour scene. The sympathies of young intellectuals such as Eu Chooi Yip for the MCP would very soon place them in an acute dilemma, and the British would exploit this to ‘expose’ the Malayan Democratic Union as a communist Trojan horse. But the MDU was a diverse and independent organization, and the Malayan Spring was a moment before such difficult and irreversible ideological choices had to be made. The question of who was and who was not a communist was of interest only to the Malayan Security Service. But police paranoia about what they rather sinisterly termed the ESI – English-speaking intelligentsia – was already beginning to dominate and distort British attempts to build a ‘Malayan’ nationalism.
The Malayan Democratic Union was to assume an importance far beyond its numbers, and would later be seen as an historic lost opportunity of Malayan politics. It arose at a moment when a broad-based multiracial patriotism seemed to be within reach; an authentic Malayan nationalism that might absorb the various aliran of the time. It was evidenced in popular culture and drew on the unstructured and flexible networks of the informal economy. Local papers now stressed the close cultural and economic connections between the Chinese and Malay communities. Through shared campaigns for the protection of journalists from harassment and for freedom of speech, a stronger sense of the ‘left’ was emerging, and in Malay the equivalent word, kiri, was increasingly used. It was a time when neither English-speaking intellectuals nor the MCP believed they could work alone and when both hoped to widen the scope of colonial reforms. The MCP seized the moment to launch a Malayan United Democratic Front. On 21 January, the anniversary of Lenin’s death, the Party held its first plenary meeting since 1941. At it, Lai Teck vigorously defended his position and on a surge of support was re-elected general secretary. In his speech, he reviewed the history of the Party, and its present position. ‘The colonial problem’, Lai Teck argued, ‘can be resolved only in [one of] two ways: liberation through a bloody revolutionary struggle (as in the case of Vietnam and Indonesia) or through the strength of united front’. He argued that both the internal conditions – the need to win support outside the Chinese community and the promise of colonial reform – and the external situation – particularly events in India and Burma – made this a time to wait and to watch, and to take the opportunity to expand the Party’s mass support.34‘Only through racial unity [could] the colonial conditions in Malaya be wound up…’; only through this could the Party ‘discharge the sacred mission entrusted upon them by history’. Lai Teck did not even mention independence as an immediate objective. Yet the policy commanded wide support and would be the foundation of the Party’s strategy for the next two years. The stated aim was the ‘hundredfold strengthening of the unity of the three races and the coalition of various parties and factions’.35
But the Malayan Communist Party and the BMA headed for confrontation. Just prior to the plenary conference Chin Peng and seven other comrades – including Colonel Itu and Liew Yao – were invited to a special ceremony in Singapore to receive their campaign medals, the Burma Star and the 1939/45 Star, from the supremo. They acknowledged Mountbatten with a clenched-fist salute. Lai Teck was still lying low. The MPAJA men were accommodated in the luxury of Raffles Hotel. At a gala cocktail party at Government House, Mountbatten greeted them with some words in Mandarin he had memorized for the occasion, Chin Peng chatted with General Messervy and Lee Kiu charmed Victor Purcell by her fascination with the royal portraits: ‘With a different hair-do’, he announced in his journal, ‘I believe she could give Miss Eng Ming Chin a run for her money.’36The next day they were to be given a VIP tour of the Royal Navy and RAF bases and the Alexandra barracks. Unwilling to be used in this way, the MPAJA leaders, after an all-night discussion, refused to attend in protest at the continued imprisonment of the Selangor guerrilla leader Soong Kwong. The British reaction was, in Chin Peng’s account, emotional. John Davis, his comrade from the jungle, arrived suddenly at the Party’s office in Kuala Lumpur with a prepared, typed apology and demanded that Chin Peng and his friends sign it. Lai Teck was in the room, but made no protest. The younger men duly signed the letter, which was never published. Ahmad Boestamam was also asked to sign series of similar pre-typed letters to the BMA to prevent his newspaper being closed down. On the face of it these were minor enough incidents, but powerful undercurrents of pride governed the relations between these young fighting men. The rookie officers of the BMA were troubled by the ignominy of 1942, and were acutely sensitive to criticism and perceived slights. The wounded izzat of the Raj collided with the determination of Asian leaders to maintain their honour and ‘face’ in the eyes of their people.
The episode looms large in Chin Peng’s account of the breakdown of the relationship between the MPAJA and the British, and of his growing frustration with the leadership of Lai Teck. But Lai Teck’s betrayals were closing in on him. In February a leader of the Partai Komunis Indonesia, Alimin, came to Kuala Lumpur with the leader of the Thai Communist Party, Li Chee Shin. Alimin was a legendary figure and a well-known Comintern agent, but was travelling under an assumed name. Lai Teck did not recognize Alimin, and was himself unknown to either communist visitor. His claim to be the Comintern’s man was weakened considerably.37 About this time, too, it seems that Lai Teck resumed his meetings with the British. It is not clear how frequent they were, or precisely what transpired at them. The few accounts by writers who have seen unreleased British records suggest that the allegations of Lai Teck’s treachery made by Ng Yeh Lu were discussed, as well as caches of arms hidden at the end of the war. Lai Teck seems to have enlarged on published Party pronouncements, and stressed that the MCP’s policy was one of peaceful pressure on the British than rather than violent confrontation.38 Although this may have reassured the British, it is not clear how else they benefited from their relationship with Lai Teck. He was increasingly compromised, and his natural life as an agent was drawing to a close.
Immediately after the plenary meeting, a general strike was called for 29 January. It was to mark the establishment of a pan-Malayan General Labour Union and its demands focused on the release of labour activists and ex-MPAJA men. By March 1946, 70 per cent of MPAJA veterans in Selangor were unemployed; thirty-three had either been convicted of or were being tried for various offences.39 The case of Soong Kwong now dominated public debate, in a way that Aung San’s did in Burma. His trial was a confrontation between the unbending logic of colonial law and the new demand for government by the popular will. It deepened local outrage that the British were not pursuing collaborators with the same energy as they were targeting their former allies. In the words of a poet:
Soong Kwong, Soong Kwong,
You have taken the wrong path.
Why didn’t you make a fortune out of the Japs,
Instead of taking up anti-Jap activities, in the tropics?
An old saying goes:
The Good and Loyal are always tortured.
The Evil and Bad are praised in temples.
Another old saying runs:
The cunning rabbits are dead,
The excellent fox remains.
You have taken the wrong path.40
Soong Kwong’s trial was riddled with inconsistencies: it was held in a military court under civil law; if military law had been used, Soong Kwong’s defenders argued, there would be no case to answer as their man was a belligerent. There were three separate trials; at the first, the British judge was overruled by the two Asian assessors and ordered a retrial; at the second, when the judge was again overruled, he ordered a third trial. On this occasion the Asian assessors were dispensed with altogether, and replaced by two British military judges, on the grounds that no Asian judge could withstand intimidation. Soong Kwong was found guilty and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. At the final hearing, he threw his slippers at the judge.
The general strike was Malaya’s first and the largest trial of strength yet between the left and the British regime. In the eyes of Philip Hoalim and other Malayan Democratic Union leaders who gave it their support, it was a strike for civil rights. A few days earlier the British had further provoked the Chinese community when British national servicemen wrecked the offices of Chinese associations and tore down pictures of Chiang Kai Shek. Local hawkers protested bitterly at one incident in Senai, Johore: ‘although we are merely hawkers who know nothing, our national flag represents our country. And they insulted our flag in such a manner!’41 The strike threatened to cripple the colonial economy. The first confrontations began on 21 January at the Singapore Harbour Board, where 7,000 stevedores again refused to load shipments of arms bound for Java. On 29 January between 150,000 and 170,000 workers downed tools in Singapore, another 60,000 in Selangor and more in Penang, Perak and elsewhere. In Singapore the markets came to a standstill and the British reported that 3,500 pickets and supporters were out on trishaws and lorries enforcing the stoppage. The Kuomintang and Chinese business leaders claimed that if the British could break the strike, they could get the city back to work within hours, but in the event the strike was abruptly called off at its peak, on the eve of Chinese New Year, just before support threatened to drop away. The General Labour Union claimed a major victory. Soong Kwong was released, his sentence remitted, on 4 February. Mountbatten had wanted to do this before the strike, but had been unwilling to be seen to capitulate to pressure. The effect was the same. In the words of the BMA’s police adviser, René Onraet: ‘never in the History of Singapore have all sections of the diverse Asiatic community been so overawed and subdued’.42 The ‘January 29 Strife’, as it became known in Communist Party annals, was a political strike, and the British justified their punitive reaction to it on these grounds. But in private they acknowledged that they were fighting unrest based on hunger. ‘The administration cannot have a clear conscience in fighting a general strike on such as basis’, warned the chief civil affairs officer in Singapore. ‘The next strike might be effective… If force were to be used, it would be disastrous for here and for the empire as a whole.’43
Despite such warnings, British opinion hardened. Mountbatten observed in his diary that officials were now calling for ‘more flogging’ and the death penalty.44 Even the architects of the liberal policy wavered. As Richard Broome, who with Force 136 had spent many months in the jungle with Chin Peng, told Mountbatten: ‘they are after revolution for the sake of revolution… The great majority of the leaders are after nothing else but trouble, and gratification of the lust for power that the stirring up of trouble gives them. They are therefore an evil force…’ A series of monster demonstrations was now planned in support of human rights. But the timing of them provoked the British beyond all endurance. The unions demanded a public holiday on 15 February, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Singapore, and asked to hold a mass rally at Happy World to mark National Humiliation Day. Enraged, Mountbatten suggested an alternative public holiday on 27 February to commemorate the sook ching massacres of Chinese.45 BMA officers pressed Mountbatten to revive pre-war mechanisms for control of associations and speech, and suggested that powers of banishment be used against the organizers. At this point, the supremo hesitated. He objected to the idea of ‘banishment’; always quick with an historical analogy, he pointed out that the banishment of Mussolini’s opponents to Lipari had kept the flame of anti-fascism active. Lenin himself had been banished by the tsar of Russia, and this had increased his prestige. And where would people be banished to, Mountbatten asked? Most were of long domicile in Malaya, and would qualify for the new Malayan Union citizenship. Should the new state choose its citizens on criteria of ‘desirability’? In the end, at Purcell’s own suggestion, Mountbatten was persuaded to use old legislation that allowed him to ‘expel aliens’; a much less loaded term. Mountbatten took the unusual step of despatching his trade-union adviser, John Brazier, to London to explain personally to Labour ministers that the General Labour Unions were not ‘legitimate’ trade unions and were out ‘to embarrass us by every means and… hoping to arouse contempt for the administration’.46 At 4 p.m. on 13 February a warning was issued that anyone who attempted to organize strikes ‘to interfere with the due course of law’ may be ‘repatriated to the country of their origin or their citizenship’. On the following evening Purcell and Broome were present at a series of pre-emptive arrests on the premises of the General Labour Union and other bodies. On 15 February the monster meeting in Singapore did not materialize, but there was a gathering outside St Joseph’s Institution, in the heart of the city. Police and troops went in with lathis and were seen by journalists to beat men lying on the ground. Two of them died and their bodies were paraded by demonstrators through the streets. Over 5,000 people attended the funeral of 18-yearold student Lin Feng Chow at the Khek Cemetery in Bukit Timah. Upcountry, the repression was more severe: in Labis, Johore, fifteen people were killed and forty-eight wounded when troops opened fire on a crowd. At Mersing, where the protests were against the original killings, another seven people were killed and twenty-six wounded.47
The ‘February 15th Incident’ marked the end of the Malayan Spring. There was public outrage at the deaths, which were reported in the British and international press. But the arrests continued. The British now had in custody many senior union leaders, including the chairman and vice-chairman of the Singapore General Labour Union, and the secretary of the MCP in Singapore, Lim Ah Liang. The British baulked at deporting Lim Ah Liang: he was jailed for four years. But Mount-batten sought permission from the Chinese government to deport ten of them. The reply came back that ‘suitable arrangements’ would be made for their reception. This stopped Mountbatten in his tracks. He was now worried that they might be ‘bumped off’ on arrival; he had heard that, fearing this, many convicted communists before the war had begged for life imprisonment rather than banishment. Purcell responded that this had not been known to happen since 1929. In that year, 850 people had been banished. Nor was the Colonial Office moved. But the supremo, now in Australia, where he failed to persuade Australian trade unionists to call off their blockade of goods for Indonesia, refused to endorse the deportations. ‘I am not thinking of my own name, or even of the good name of the military administration, I am solely imbued with the desire to act in a manner which I consider in the true interests of HMG, and which history in ten years’ time will vindicate.’48The civil government, due to take over at the end of March, must deal with the issue. The problem was, as the growing number of hardliners – now including Purcell and Hone – well realized, that although civil government could reintroduce banishment it would also have to reintroduce habeas corpus. ‘It is’, Mountbatten concluded, ‘precisely because the civil government is unable to detain these people legally that I am being asked to take action.’49 The general feeling of the British in Malaya was that Mount-batten was determined ‘not to let himself in for any unpleasant political consequences’.50He wished to be remembered as a liberator. ‘I do not really think he believed that the Chinese communists were really communists,’ Hone reflected later. ‘He thought that they were just decent left-wing chaps who valued freedom of speech and freedom of association as much as we did and that if they were properly handled by the administration generally, they were 100% British.’51 On the first day of civilian rule, Hone reported, in one of its first acts, the new government ‘despatched ten little nigger boys homeward’.52
Victor Purcell was also about to depart. His own progress had been extraordinary: from tribune of the liberal imperialism to one of the leading advocates of preventive detentions. A personal turning point, he recalled twenty years later, had been on 29 January when the servants in the residence he and Ralph Hone shared refused to serve them. It was clear then that ‘we must prevent them taking charge of the country or abdicate’. The illusions of liberal imperialism were exploded. Purcell was, like many British officials, unable to live with the consequences of his own policy. Democratic opinion that had emerged in the Malayan Spring appalled him, so too had the very idea of ‘the people’. ‘The ideal human being boils down to the moronic’, he wrote in one of the last of his journals, ‘the adenoidal, the unwashed, the scrofulous, the naked, the illiterate, the dumb and, above all, the passive and the victimised.’ This was not a ‘people’, Purcell seemed to say, on which a progressive colonial policy could be based: ‘until Malaya produces her own leaders and her own sense of civic responsibility (which sometimes seems a thousand miles away) we must continue to accept the responsibility of governing’.53 For Malayans, the Spring was a chance to explore the meaning of freedom, and most had rejected the freedom that was on offer from the British.
Apparently, the democracy demanded by the people in the past few months differs a great deal from the democratic system as specified by the British Army. Hence ‘democratic’ tragedies have occurred incessantly. Perhaps the BMA may accuse the people of abusing ‘freedom’ over the past few months, but they must reflect on that which they promised the people. How may the people use the freedom so as to conform to the government specifications? There is no definite statement, and so the random use of force is inevitable.54
Over the coming months, ‘the laws of 1941’ would begin to return. The Malayan Spring was an epochal and tragic moment. It was a period when the people of Malaya, for the first time under colonial rule, began to taste political freedom and debate the meaning of their Merdeka. Never again in Malaya’s history would intellectual and political activity be subject to so few legal restraints.