The crucible of the coming struggles was the Kinta valley of Perak. In the nineteenth century it had been Southeast Asia’s Klondike and it remained its industrial heartland. The area is formed by two granite masses: the central range of the peninsula – which rises to heights of around 2,108 metres in the north – and a spur, the Kledang range, that forms the watershed between the Kinta and Perak rivers. The valley – around 58 kilometres north to south and 45 kilometres east to west – is edged by towering limestone outcrops. This frontier region was opened up by large-scale tin mining in the hills, and modern dredging methods were first pioneered in the swamps of the coastal plain. The hillsides were edged with rubber plantations. In Kinta the delicate pluralism of rural Malaya could be seen in microcosm. Large concentrations of Chinese and Indian labour lived alongside Malay kampongs that stretched down to the lowlands. It was Malaya’s most urbanized area: over half of the population lived in the towns or main villages. The main settlement, Ipoh, dominated the region. It was an important centre of education and printing, a place of political initiation for men like Chin Peng and Wu Tian Wang of the MCP. The Malay Nationalist Party was launched in Ipoh, and it was a centre, too, of UMNO’s organization. Ipoh was built by Chinese millionaries and its markets were supplied by Chinese peasant farmers. In hard times this was a brutal juxtaposition of wealth and want. The urban world and the forest were never far apart. In the war, the dense networks of roads and estate and mining tracks, the hidden limestone caves and jungle trails, had made it an ideal terrain for guerrilla armies to operate. From Kinta the mountain forests stretched eastwards almost to the coast and connected the central spine of the peninsula from the Thai border to the badlands of central Johore in the south.34 Kinta witnessed first blood between the British and the MCP in October 1945, when troops opened fire on demonstrators in Sungei Siput. And in June 1948 this small town would be the spark that ignited the Malayan revolution.
Kinta was home to the largest concentrations of Chinese squatters in Malaya: perhaps 94,000 out of the district’s total population of around 281,500. Most of them were on mining land.35 Numbers had risen in the war, and the British expectation was that, in peacetime, they would drift back to the towns and mines. But food and work remained scarce. The Chinese mines faced discrimination in the allocation of rehabilitation loans and many small labour-intensive mines stopped producing altogether. In 1948, the mining labour force was below a third of its 1940 level, and at the middle of the year there were up to 28,000 unemployed workers in the area. But a major change had taken place in the rural economy. When men returned to wage labour, they left their families behind in the squatter hamlets. For the first time Malaya possessed a permanent population of Chinese peasant farmers. This broke down the old ethnic division of labour whereby food growing was the preserve of the kampong Malays living in designated ‘Malay reservations’. And whereas single males had once lived collectively in the kongsi, or communal hut, now a labourer usually had his own hut in which to raise his children. Between the censuses of 1931 and 1947, the proportion of children in Perak had risen from 25.6 to 39.3 per cent; the number of local-born Chinese from 31 to 65 per cent. Like Indians on the estates, the militant stance of Chinese in labour disputes was a fight for the future of their families. This phenomenon was repeated right across Malaya. There were 12–15,000 squatters on the land of Batu Arang colliery in Selangor, which, like a rubber estate, was private land. They were a direct challenge to managers’ authority. Workers and squatters were, as often as not, the same people. The ability of workers to fall back on farming in the event of low wages or a strike gave them an independence and leverage that they had never possessed before.36
Initially, British officials showed some sympathy for these settlers. In Malay reservations and in forest reserves Chinese farmers were given a two-year reprieve and allowed to grow food. They were forced to pay charges, to take out permits, or temporary occupation licences, and occasionally long-term crops like tapioca, or commercial plantings of tobacco were pulled up. But few cases ended in eviction: Malaya needed the food these peasants grew. In the later part of 1947, however, tensions intensified as colonial regulations were reimposed in a relentless way. On rubber estates, which had been largely abandoned to food crops in the war, European companies demanded the removal of squatters to make way for replanting: they claimed that 40,000 acres were occupied. Malay politicians wanted to evict Chinese farmers from state land and Malay reservations, where Malays had exclusive call on the land. The pressure did not always come from the Malay farmers themselves. In many areas there were long-running informal agreements whereby Chinese might cultivate or tap Malay rubber smallholdings in return for a fee or part of the yield. There was little evidence of Malay land hunger in this period: official land settlement schemes found few takers. The new opportunities for young Malays lay in the towns, in the police or lower ranks of the expanding bureaucracy. Malays now constituted 17.5 per cent of the wage labour force. But land was a deeply symbolic issue for Malay politicians and bureaucrats. Under the new federal constitution, control of land was a state matter. When, under pressure from the Chinese leader, H. S. Lee, the federal government asked state governments if there was land available for the Chinese, it was told there was none to be had. In this way, Malay elites demonstrated Malay prerogatives.37
Many more squatters were in forest reserves. These were a prized imperial asset: Malaya accounted for 45 per cent of the timber reserves of the British Empire in 1945, and their importance rose with the loss of Burma. Foresters argued that large-scale terrace farming by squatters was responsible for soil erosion that threatened damage to the lower-lying areas where the rubber estates were situated. Planters inveighed at this ‘wanton destruction’. In fact, the erosion of the thin local soil, and the imbalanced ecosystem dominated by a ‘new jungle’ of imported single crops, was largely the consequence of their own methods.38 But planters were determined to get a grip on their labour forces, and ecological arguments were used to increase pressure on the rural Chinese. In mid July, in the Kroh forest reserve in Kinta, 837 peasants were rounded up in mass arrests for not taking out permits.39 In nearby Sungei Siput large-scale prosecutions began of squatters without permits in late 1947; in December alone 151 people were charged. The bailiffs moved in. In January 1948 2,600 families in Kuala Kangsar district were given two months to quit. In May officers began pulling up crops. The peasants argued they were now wholly dependent on padi, that with layoffs on the rubber estates they had no alternative source of income, and that the planting season was already underway. But they were told to demolish their houses and move on. ‘We are very much frightened and miserable’, they protested, ‘because we are very poor farmers, just eking out a living…’40
The squatters began to fight back: farmers evaded officials, changed their names and hid their crops under debris. They drew up petitions to point out that the Japanese and British governments had actively encouraged them to open up land for food. But they also invoked a larger principle. In the Malay States, it was a local tradition, enshrined in colonial practice, that the man who brought jungle into cultivation and maintained it had a proprietorial right to it. Peasants now asked: ‘Why do the Chinese have no freedom of cultivation yet the Malays enjoy these privileges?’41 The British saw the red ink of communist propaganda in these demands. Yet it was clear that the squatters were now firmly rooted in a complex rural economy. They exploited the forest; they took rubber on a self-tap, self-sell basis. A typical family of five worked on an average three acres of land, and supported ten other families in the towns. According to one estimate, 95 per cent of Malaya’s population was dependent on squatter production in one way or another. In Perak they not only supplied rice and vegetables but 5,000 pigs a month, 12,688 fowl and 200,000 duck and hen’s eggs. Yet the squatters themselves were poor: their average family income was only $150 a month.42 Above all, they demanded to stay in areas where their families had put down roots, and where they had been living as more or less self-governing communities. ‘We find it very difficult to redistribute the land again’, they explained, ‘for the farmers want to preserve their former allotments and disputes and fights will start [trouble] if a redistribution is forced upon them.’43 At a mass meeting in Sungei Siput, farmers emphasized their suffering during the Japanese occupation. It was an area of counter-insurgency operations against the communists and they had been caught in the middle of it.44 But what stiffened the government’s resolve to move against the squatters was its belief that it was losing political control of these areas. Both British and Chinese employers sensed an opportunity to tame their industrial labour.
When forest officers began to tear up crops, the protests turned violent. One official, D. Speldewinde, described an incident when he entered a squatter area in Changkat Jong with some Malay assistants to pull up some illegal tapioca plants:
The young man made a speech and ended in Malay, saying, ‘We were not afraid of the Japs and we are not afraid of the British. Don’t you think you can do these things to Chinese and get away with it… All of a sudden this young Chinese shouted, ‘pak ung mor’ [Beat up the ‘red hair’] and about thirty of them dived in surrounding tapioca bushes and each seized a spear and came towards us on the run. Two of the forest workers ran away and then we were surrounded. All I could do was to take a parang and prepare to defend myself.
Some older men intervened and saved Speldewinde and his men. The young firebrand was later arrested. It turned out he was president of the local peasants’ union.45 The membership of Chinese rubber-workers’ unions and peasants’ unions overlapped. They shared the same offices and framed their demands in similar terms. When evictions of squatters occurred at the same time as dismissals and evictions from rubber estates, the situation for the rural Chinese became desperate and the mood explosive. The situation in Perak came to a head with a new wave of strike action, led by the MCP Indian labour organizer R. G. Balan. He toured estates raising the tempo of protest: European managers, he said, would be nothing but coolies in their own country, but in Malaya they lived in luxury and obtained beautiful cars by exploiting the workers. Once again, estate managers sent their wives and families to the towns for safety.46 By May there were calls for resistance to the police. Workers were told to grow food and maintain strikes as long as possible. They were told not to fear arrest; this would add pressure to the government, who would have to build jails to house them and buy food to feed them. The disputes moved to the larger estates, where living conditions were better, and their political motives were clear. At the Lima Blas and Kelapa Bali estates in Slim river strikes escalated when a manager refused to employ some fifty-four Indian and twenty-four Chinese labourers. Police and soldiers were moved in to support the evictions. The trouble spread across the Sungei Siput area. In Johore there were attacks on labour bosses with revolvers and knives. The manager of the Chan Kang Swee estate was forced to flee. His labourers began to tap and sell rubber for themselves and blocked entry and exit to the estate. When the police arrived they initially had to withdraw. When they returned with a magistrate they faced a large hostile crowd armed with spears, parangs and changkols. Eight labourers were killed and thirty more arrested. In a dispute on Sagil estate in Johore, the manager was knocked unconscious and was about to be decapitated when the police arrived.47
Singapore was also again hit by strikes. As in the previous year, the centre of the conflict was the Singapore Harbour Board. But the struggle was becoming more violent. The previous year communist-backed unions had managed to take over the system of labour contracting. In early 1948 the management decided to deal directly with labourers and a strike broke out. At one point the chairman of the board was approached by a Chinese businessman and asked if he wanted the help of secret-society men to fight the strikers. He refused the offer, but soon afterwards had to leave Singapore under the shadow of a death sentence from the MCP. Hand grenades were thrown at working stevedores. The strikes divided workers; the Kuomintang backed rival associations and the communist trade unions acted as if they were fighting for survival.48 In the midst of this, the government banned the annual May Day parade, and the annual conference of the Federations of Trade Unions voiced a militant defiance. On 15 May the MCP Central Committee convened for a final time. Practical preparations for insurrection were set in motion: guerrilla bands were to be established on a state-by-state basis, a nucleus that could be expanded later. Party workers in the towns were told to avoid arrest, to withdraw to the countryside and lose themselves in the squatter settlements. The new directives were couched in defensive terms. They did not lay plans for a coup d’état. Instead, the MCP was waiting for the repression that would provide it with the legitimacy and the popular support that would carry it forward into revolution. The coming crackdown on organized labour would give it an opportunity to demonstrate leadership. The biggest obstacle to the Party’s control over the labourers were the kong chak, ‘labour thieves’, or contractors, and the ‘running dogs’ who supplied information to the police. They were now to be eliminated. At this point there was no general order to kill Europeans. However, the broad terms of the directives gave discretion to local cadres.49
Between 17 May and 7 June twelve managers and one foreman were murdered; all were Asian except one European mining superintendent who, during a robbery, proved to be too slow in opening a safe where wages were kept. On 12 June in central Johore, three Kuomintang leaders were shot dead in their homes. Gent was under siege from delegations of planters: they were at a loss to understand why he did not act more decisively to protect them. In a speech to the Legislative Council on 31 May the chief spokesman for expatriate business, Aubrey Wallich, blamed the communists for the violence. Gent now telegraphed London to warn of ‘the imminence of [an] organized campaign of murder by Communist agitators’. On 31 May the new trade union legislation finally came into operation, and the Federations of Trade Unions were outlawed on 13 June. But officials remained bitterly divided over the necessity for more extreme measures. Some years later, John Dalley, the head of the Malayan Security Service, revealed that as early as September 1947 he had recommended operations against ‘uniformed armed Communists training and encamped in the jungle’ in Johore. He gave a figure of potential men-and women-in-arms of 5,000; it was, he said, ‘given to me by the Secretary General of the Communist Party!’ The police denied that the problem existed, and Gent had backed them. By December, Dalley was ‘desperate’. He wrote a memorandum listing ‘Gent’s omissions and commissions’ and sent it to MacDonald and to Gent himself. Gent never mentioned it to Dalley. In April and May he again flatly refused to countenance repressive measures.50
Malcolm MacDonald now concluded that Gent’s useful time was at an end. The governor’s future had been in doubt since the beginning of the year. On a visit to London in May, MacDonald pressed for his recall, and Attlee was informed of it. Ironically, MacDonald’s main argument related not to the issue of communism but to the fact that Dato Onn and other Malay leaders ‘dislike him and distrust immensely’. The overriding reason for the seeming inertia in dealing with the strikes and violence was the fact that MacDonald’s own argument of the previous June still held: the Labour government would not permit the banning of the MCP unless there was conclusive evidence for its conspiracy to overthrow the local government. The Malayan Security Service had issued dire prognostications about the MCP – and equally about the Kuomintang and ‘Indonesian’ influences – but it had given little in the way of a hard assessment of communist intentions.51 As one watcher of the skies in Whitehall, J. B. Williams, commented on 28 May after reading intelligence reports, the effect was ‘almost of melodrama. It conjures up pictures of hordes of people burrowing mole-like in the interstices of Malayan society or scurrying hither and thither on their mischievous errands, so that one may almost wonder whether that society is not about to rock to its fall’. But, Williams concluded, nothing ‘would lead us to suppose that any serious trouble is brewing in Malaya. The threat, such as it was, came from ‘mere bandits’ rather than the communists whose ‘immediate threat is but slight’.52 Two weeks later, on 14 June, the British government received Dalley’s own assessment: ‘There is no immediate threat to internal security in Malaya, although the position is constantly changing and is potentially dangerous.’53 This gave no firm indication that the MCP had ordered an armed revolt. But no such command had, in fact, been issued: it was contingent on the actions of the British themselves.