In 1947, an empire was lost, and an empire regained by the British. But there remained powerful challengers to colonial authority in Southeast Asia. And whilst opposition forces seemed to be travelling different paths, by the end of the year the British and their Malay allies were haunted by the prospect that they might, against all expectations, converge. The search by ethnic minorities for belonging; the demand of trade unionists for material progress; the Malayan Communist Party’s need for allies, and the drive by the Malays for economic advancement all seemed to come together in the question of the new constitution for Malaya. A blueprint for a new Federation of Malaya had been agreed by the British, UMNO and the Malay rulers in secret talks throughout the second half of 1946. Although Malay leaders remained bitter about the Malayan Union episode – none more so than Dato Onn himself – they had defeated its most objectionable aspects. The Federation guaranteed the special rights of the Malay people. It was a return to indirect rule: new treaties with the Malay rulers, as Onn repeatedly emphasized, were an endorsement of Malay sovereignty. The new legal entity was to be termed the Persekutuan Tanah Melayu, a federation of Malay lands. The constitution enshrined a stringent legal definition of a ‘Malay’, but none for a ‘Malayan’. There was to be no ‘Malayan’ nationality.113 The constitution conceded citizenship rights to non-Malays, but whereas under the Malayan Union these would have extended to 83 per cent of the Chinese and 75 per cent of the Indians, far fewer people would now qualify.114 For the British this was a major retreat from the idealism of the Malayan Union. But when the final proposals went to the cabinet in July, the colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, viewed the future with some complacency. He believed that 90 per cent of the original strategic objectives of the Union had been secured, particularly the creation of a stronger, more cohesive central government and a common citizenship. Singapore remained outside the Federation, but this was the price of Anglo-Malay accord, and the growing divisions in policy between the two territories made the prospect of union in the future increasingly unlikely. Creech Jones reassured colleagues that the new constitution was opposed only by a ‘noisy minority’.115
The proposals were put to a consultative committee of local dignitaries. Up until this point the British had assumed that non-Malays were, at best, indifferent to constitutional change. Support for the Malayan Union had been muted. Many non-Malays still thought in terms of dual citizenship with their country of birth; they were alienated by the exclusion of Singapore, and the left had argued that the Union was undemocratic, negotiated with ‘feudal remnants’ and not the people. But, as the Anglo-Malay entente deepened after mid-1946, Chinese associations mobilized to defend the Union’s more liberal provisions for citizenship. It was clear that the status of non-Malays was more insecure than ever; the gateway to citizenship had narrowed and the prospects for a democratic Malaya, of which Singapore was seen as an indivisible part, had receded.116 Leaders were incensed at the limited nature of the consultation. The two leading Chinese members of the consultative committee were H. S. Lee and a leading Perak Chinese, Leong Yew Koh, both of whom held Kuomintang military rank. As John Eber of the Malayan Democratic Union observed bitterly, ‘What right have colonels in the Chinese army, owing presumably their undivided loyalty to China, to adjudicate or speak on behalf of the people of Malaya?’ In late 1946, to speak for Malaya, the Malayan Democratic Union took a central role in the formation of the Pan-Malayan Council of Joint Action (later the All-Malayan Council of Joint Action, AMCJA). At its inaugural meeting in Kuala Lumpur on 19 November it rejected all existing Anglo-Malay agreements; it boycotted the consultative committee and demanded recognition as ‘the only body that speaks for all Asiatic communities’.
The AMCJA was an attempt to draw together the various aliran, or flows of consciousness, within radical politics in Malaya, and all of them, at one time or another, would claim to have been its inspiration. The Malayan Communist Party, sensing that here there was political capital to be made, encouraged the initiative. Its open representative, the journalist Liew Yit Fan, attended the inaugural meeting, and although the Party never joined the AMCJA, its main satellite organizations, the New Democratic Youth League and the Federations of Trade Unions, were its largest components.117But equally prominent, and entirely unprecedented, was the presence of leaders of the Malay Nationalist Party. With UMNO increasingly allied to the colonial government, the Malay radicals saw that they could not go it alone: ‘we shall safeguard our special rights’, it announced, ‘but we cannot carry on an isolated fight – isolation means defeat’. It now sought a common front against feudalism and for the popular will; in joining the AMCJA, it made an alliance of a kind that UMNO could not match.118 This was a bold and a dangerous political undertaking: the Malay Nationalist Party immediately faced charges that it had sold out the Malay people. To counter this, it withdrew from the AMCJA to form its own parallel coalition, the Pusat Tenaga Rakyat – Centre of People’s Power – or PUTERA. The man charged with leading it was Ishak Haji Muhammad, a celebrated novelist and journalist. He took the view that the party should give the experiment ‘a fair trial for one or two years’. In the course of 1947 Dr Burhanuddin lost support. The leftists within the Malay Nationalist Party were wary of his religiosity, and impatient with his caution.119 At the end of the year, in a delicately arranged coup, he was replaced as party leader by Ishak, although he remained its special adviser. Ishak represented a different stream of Malay radicalism, more secular and socialist in outlook. He was fluent in English, which Dr Burhanuddin was not, and as both an intellectual and a Bohemian he was more than a match for the leaders of the Malayan Democratic Union.
The chairman of the PUTERA–AMCJA was a 63-year-old Straits Chinese notable, Tan Cheng Lock. At first glance he appeared an unlikely choice to lead an alliance of young radicals. He lived a world apart from most of them, in a sprawling, antique-cluttered Chinese mansion at 111 Heeren St, Malacca. Before the war he had been the leading Asian on the Legislative Council of the Straits Settlements, but had retired from public affairs, in a state of some disillusion, to Switzerland. He spent the war in India, far removed from the social upheaval at home. But he was remembered by the younger men of Malayan Democratic Union as one of the first advocates of a ‘Malayan’ nationalism. He commanded influence within the powerful Chinese business community, and on his return to Malaya in 1946 had been one of the first of its leaders to argue that the Union was a first step towards self-government and that the Chinese should act in concert to defend their position.120 But equally important was his status as a Straits Chinese, a member of a long-domiciled community that had absorbed Malay culture and habitually spoke the Malay language. As John Eber flattered him: ‘the Council needs an individual who is a Malayan as a focus… As it is you represent all interests.’ Tan Cheng Lock traced his local roots to 1771 – as ‘a true anak Malaka [son of Malacca]’ – and to a generation he would hold mythic status as one of the first true Malayan patriots. His multiracialism was rooted in a utopian cast of mind. His writings and speeches had a philosophical, somewhat mystical flavour, and were peppered with references to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, alongside the classic Chinese philosophy he had absorbed in English translation (like many Straits Chinese, Tan Cheng Lock could neither read nor write Chinese). He shared the spiritual cosmopolitanism of many Asian thinkers of the pre-war era; like Tagore, he searched for the underlying commonalties of Asia’s civilizations. But his nationalism was based on a modern democratic citizenship.121
We in Malaya have adopted and want to apply the dynamic conceptions of nationalism and democracy. Nationalism, if it is to be a unifying force, requires the elimination of communalism from political life. Democracy demands for its free operation an understanding of the conflicting claims of race and language and a willingness to compromise on major political issues after full and free discussion.122
When the Malay Nationalist Party met in Malacca, Dr Burhanuddin had called on him, and Tan Cheng Lock had promptly offered to raise $500,000 for Malay economic development. In the years to come he was to devote much of his energy into brokering an accord between the Malay political and administrative class and Chinese economic muscle.123
The British saw Tan Cheng Lock as a communist dupe. ‘A disgruntled “failed KCMG”’, the writer of one intelligence brief sneered, ‘who has time and money to squander on antics which keep him in the public eye.’124 A key role was played by the secretary of the AMCJA, Gerald de Cruz, the principal liaison with the Malayan Democratic Union, who took the lead in the organization, and the communist leadership. Certainly it was the MCP that provided much of the mass support: 300,000 from the Federations of Trade Unions alone. Yet the MCP leaders would later regret committing so far to a movement whose agenda they could not control.125 From most accounts of its meetings, the PUTERA–AMCJA was a multivalent body, which no one party succeeding in dominating. The vital need for Malay support gave PUTERA a strong hand. This was particularly apparent in the debates on the constitution. Eber had argued from the outset that the only credible way to oppose the federal plan was to propose an alternative. Its founding principles were hammered out at a series of sub-committee meetings, the most critical in July 1947 at the office of the New Democratic Youth League in Foch Avenue, Kuala Lumpur, a building they shared with the Malayan Communist Party. The meeting, held in English, was attended by the leading figures of the movements involved and chaired by Ishak Haji Muhammad. Mustapha Hussain was witness to it. Ishak, he noted, chose careful words: ‘Everyone adopted a passive attitude, a patient disposition, a peaceful mind and a united stance.’ The central proposal by the Malayan Democratic Union was for a common ‘Malayan’ citizenship, but straightaway this ran into difficulty with the PUTERA representatives. The Malay people, they argued, would not accept the word ‘Malayan’; it was a term imposed on them that did not connote the Malays. The Cambridge-educated Malayan Democratic Union leader, Lim Kean Chye, was indignant: ‘We are not dogs to be led by the people. We lead the people.’ This provoked an angry retort from Mustapha Hussain: ‘Do not humiliate the people.’ The Malays, he went on, ‘slept in bus stations and train stations in order to attend this conference. Some did not even have breakfast. They drank coffee out of a pail. But you, sir (looking at John Eber), even though you were given a comfortable rattan chair, you still need a folded towel to serve as a cushion. Who among us truly needs independence, you or us?’126
Yet a way forward was found. The term ‘Malayan’ was translated as Melayu. To UMNO, this connoted race, but to the Malay left – in the writings of its ideologue Dr Burhanuddin, for example – it had quite a different meaning. In recent months Burhanuddin had placed less emphasis on a Greater Indonesia and more on the inclusion of non-Malays in a kebangsaan Melayu, a Melayu nation. This was open to non-Malays, if they were to embrace it wholeheartedly, to sever their links with other nations and demonstrate their love for Malaya by a ‘willingness to change their bangsa to bangsa Melayu.’ The Melayu, as PUTERA understood it, carried within it the intent ‘to live and die as a Malay’. But a further question arose. Islam was a vital component of Malay history and culture. In the vernacular, to masuk Melayu, ‘become Malay’, meant also to become a Muslim. Did this mean that to truly belong the non-Malays had to accept Islam? The PUTERA spokesmen seemed to deny that it did: Melayu was solely a legal and political category, and freedom of religion was guaranteed in the constitution proposals. ‘The content of “Melayu” nationality’, Boestamam insisted when casting the deciding vote on the issue, ‘is just and not oppressive, wide and progressive.’127 The non-Malays, too, saw the need for an exclusive allegiance to Malaya, but saw nationality as grounded in the individual rights of the citizen; a legal category, which, in a multiracial context, had no implications for cultural conformity.128
The crucial, creative ambiguity was left unresolved; it was, in a sense, lost in translation. Yet the People’s Constitution, as drafted largely by John Eber, went further than the British ever did in envisaging an exclusive nationality for Malaya’s people. It dissolved the distinctions between nationality and citizenship – between indigenous and non-indigenous – that lay at the heart of British proposals. The people’s alternative enshrined jus soli, and offered citizenship to all those who had lived in Malaya for eight of the preceding ten years. In effect, this made the common experience of the Japanese occupation the defining transition. The final test of loyalty was ‘the country in which a man would prefer to lay his bones, and for which he is prepared to die to defend, is his home’. The People’s Constitution united Malaya and Singapore in a federation where the rulers were sovereign but constitutional monarchs governed by a legislature elected through universal suffrage and, in a further concession to the Malays, for the first nine years 55 per cent of the representatives were to be of Malay descent. The Malay language would be the national language, although other tongues might be used in the new national assembly. Malay religion and custom would remain in the hands of the Malays, and a Council of Races would monitor legislation for discrimination. But these provisions failed to impress the defenders of Malay primacy within the British administration. One observed that it left the Malays like ‘the unfortunate king, so well known in their history, whose “bottom was being stuck with thorns at the same time that his mouth was being fed with bananas”’.129
The People’s Constitution received only passing attention from the British. Gent told the Colonial Office that the AMCJA commanded no support and should be ignored. ‘An academic exercise’, was the conclusion in London; ‘a typical production of people unaccustomed to political power and responsibility, and either unaware of, or unwilling to face, the real difficulties of personal and racial animosities, and of economic rivalries, which make Malayan politics so confused and the problem of settling a stable constitution so intractable’.130 This was an astonishing statement. To its creators, the constitution came directly out of the experience of managing difference. ‘It was quite clear from the outset’, Philip Hoalim argued later, ‘that our partners accepted the leadership of the Malayan Democratic Union. We, for our part, put unity first on our list of priorities and fashioned a constitution which would embody this unity in practice.’131 But the British were not interested in alternatives. After the volte-face on the Malayan Union the previous year, they could not back down a second time, Gent least of all. MacDonald was less convinced, but the mounting confrontation with the unions in the course of 1947 and the vital need for Malay backing settled the matter. The final version of the federal constitution that was published in July was barely amended by the consultations. Faced with the intractable opposition of the British and UMNO, the united front leaders decided to take direct action.
PUTERA–AMCJA announced a hartal, or stoppage, for 20 October 1947, the date of the opening of the session of the British Parliament at which the future of Malaya would be discussed. The hartal was a new concept in Malaya, a staple of the civil disobedience of the Indian National Congress, which Tan Cheng Lock had admired during his sojourn there. It was unprecedented too in that, through Tan Cheng Lock’s mediation, the Chinese towkays joined the demonstrations, led by the Associated Chinese Chambers of Commerce and the clan associations. They resented chiefly the watered-down citizenship provisions of the British proposals and the exclusion of Singapore. They had lobbied London and the consultative committee to no effect. The Chinese leaders who had sat on it, H. S. Lee and Leong Yew Koh, helped broker an understanding with the PUTERA–AMCJA. The main support came from Singapore, from Lee Kong Chian, the son-in-law of the overseas Chinese leader Tan Kah Kee, who commanded the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce. It was an unnatural alliance. Many businessmen refused to co-operate with communists. The Malayan Democratic Union was reluctant to work with bodies whose protest was ‘strictly negative’ against the colonial constitution, and which did not support the nationality proposals of the people’s alternative. The combined leadership never met; it merely declared protests on the same day. But the participation of Chinese business made the hartal a monumental and well-financed undertaking: 400,000 copies of the manifesto and 300,000 posters were distributed, and 300 propaganda groups toured the country to prepare the ground.132 In the words of one local writer: ‘In coffee shop and government office, in rubber estate lines and bus depots, by Governors over the radio and by leader writers in the press, people talked of local issues such as self-government, citizenship and communalism in a manner that made the six-year gap between 1941 and 1947 seem sixty. People talked of Malaya as home. It bewildered many.’133
By all accounts, Singapore and Malaya came to a complete standstill on 20 October. ‘Kuala Lumpur that day’, Ahmad Boestamam wrote, ‘was deserted, like a land defeated by the invincible garuda [the eagle of apocalyptic legend]. Only PUTERA–AMCJA were to be seen going round the town to verify that the hartal was really a complete success.’134 The scene was repeated throughout the country: the port of Singapore was throttled, and only the remoter villages and estates were less affected, although Malay support was strong in the fishing kampongs of the east coast. The organizers declared the hartal to be 90 per cent effective: ‘It was the first political strike in Malaya to be observed by all sections of the people.’135 The British refused to acknowledge the extent of the opposition it demonstrated. The Malayan Security Service reduced participation to statistics: 5 per cent joined for ‘political motives’; 30 per cent through ‘Chinese defensive nationalism’; 50 per cent were ‘sheep’, following in fear or ignorance; 5 per cent ‘disgruntled’ and a further 10 per cent ‘incidentals’. Yet it struggled to find evidence of intimidation anywhere.136
But then came the backlash. Tan Cheng Lock was now under direct attack from the British and from his own community. Many Chinese blamed him for conceding Malay majority rule in the People’s Constitution, and baulked at the implications of the Melayu nationality. The Straits Timeswhipped up the communist bogey. From this point, Tan Cheng Lock absented himself from most PUTERA–AMCJA meetings. It was said that the outbreak of labour trouble on his own rubber estates contributed to this.137 The alliance with Chinese Chambers of Commerce was not to be repeated. By the end of 1947 the fastest growing political party in Malaya was the party of business, the Kuomintang. In the first days of peace it had lain low, but now it was looking to assert its position. When MacDonald convened his summit meeting on the MCP in June, those present acknowledged that, along with UMNO on the peninsula, the Kuomintang was the only effective counter-balance to the MCP. Only the Kuomintang’s own reputation for violence stood in the way of open co-operation with it. MacDonald still cherished hopes that ‘a centre or Centre-Left party’ might emerge with which the British could treat.138 ‘Our ultimate and supreme aim’, he announced in a broadcast on the eve of the hartal, ‘is a government of the peoples of Malaya, for the peoples of Malaya and by the peoples of Malaya’.139 But the British had now reconciled themselves to alliance with ethnic-based parties in order to hold on to their diminished Asian empire.
The British repudiated the movement that most closely resembled the multiracial ‘Malayan’ nationalism they had originally sought to create. But the exuberant populism of the left was anathema to them. They could not see beyond the participation of the Malayan Communist Party and its proxies in PUTERA–AMCJA, and with this the People’s Constitution would be for ever tainted. It was also to be dismissed as a superficial, paper alliance.140 But this is not how it was seen by those involved at the time. It was seen as a great experiment, of learning by doing, in which the leaders of many different communities were debating, arguing, dividing and reconciling in the name of freedom and unity. It was a moment – in the face of the competing pull of communal politics – when a popular multiracial nationalism seemed a real possibility, and, in retrospect, an historic missed opportunity, perhaps.141 The PUTERA–AMCJA did not collapse through division or disillusionment. Despite the withdrawal of the towkays, in late 1947 the morale of its leaders was high. Its fate was decided for it when it became caught in the crossfire of the looming confrontation between the British and the MCP. But this would not be solely a conflict between imperialism and its enemies. Across Asia a second conflict was looming, a war that would be fought to neutralize the central political legacy of the first. In the Japanese war, a new generation had formed popular movements that threatened to overturn prewar hierarchies. In the intoxicating air of the post-war spring, Asia’s pemuda had seized the streets and villages, filled them with their propaganda and stood up against imperialism and feudalism. But now, in free Asia and colonial Asia, this fresh-won freedom – of youth, of women, of workers – had to contend with the re-establishment of more conservative, patriarchal forms of authority. Bosses, landlords and bureaucrats would attempt to claw back some of the ground they had lost; 1948 would be a year of confrontation.