Forgotten Wars (80 page)

This was one of the last official interventions by China in Malayan affairs. The fall of Kuomintang China was a moment of decision for the local Chinese. Tan Kah Kee played a significant and symbolic role in the new People’s Political Consultative Conference. His overt support for Mao so exasperated the British that they considered arresting him, or depriving him of his British citizenship. But they drew back from this: Tan Kah Kee’s status was now effectively that of a minister within the new regime. When he left for China in late May there were persistent rumours that he had been deported.
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These events left the Malayan Chinese divided and uncertain. When the Double Tenth national-day celebrations arrived there was a ban on public meetings. A battle of the flags broke out in the towns. In Chinatown in Singapore the banner of the People’s Republic was openly on sale but, on the day, only fifty ‘five star’ flags were seen in the city, mostly in trade union offices and schools; only fifty-two were counted in Penang; none in Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh or Taiping. Possession of this kind of paraphernalia was now dangerous. There were muted celebrations by one of the last vanguards of leftist influence, the Mayfair theatrical troupe in Singapore, which put on a rousing play called
The Volunteers’ March
. Its signboard was tarred. By contrast, a cocktail party by the consul of the nationalist regime in Taiwan was attended by 600 representatives of Chinese associations.
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But below the surface there was considerable elation at the communist victory. It boosted the MCP’s cause in the countryside
and kept alive a sense of expectancy, so much so that Party propaganda had to dismiss as ‘wishful thinking and completely divorced from reality’ rumours that a victorious Red Army was about to sweep into Malaya.
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The colonial regime was in a bind. The whole logic of Britain’s economic and strategic interests demanded that the new People’s Republic of China be recognized. But Gurney believed that the arrival of communist Chinese consuls would be a ‘suicidal folly’, equivalent to reinforcing the guerrillas by an entire division. He made the issue a resigning matter, and prevailed.
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Gurney was becoming increasingly impatient with the Malayan Chinese. He believed that the insurrection was financed by payment of protection money on a massive scale, and that this practice reached into the highest echelons of the business community. He chose first a softer target: a number of Chettiyar businessmen were arrested, many of them absentee owners of rubber estates. In 1949 the British estimated that they had lost control of a quarter of an estimated million acres of estate land. Their payments to the MNLA varied from $ 50 to $5,000 a month and a cess on the rubber produced. There was a small exodus of Chettiyars as they closed their estates and moved their persons and their capital back to India. They were still counting their losses in Burma and smarting from the British anti-INA witchhunts of 1945. Remittances abroad by Asians rose from US$16m in 1949 to US$130m in 1951.
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But Gurney’s real target was the Chinese
towkays
: the individual sums estimated to be changing hands here were astronomical: $100,000 a month or higher. The guerrillas in the jungle were awash with cash: ‘Our people said at that time’, recalled Chin Peng, ‘we had… a haversack full of money… but we can’t get a bit of food.’
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Gurney saw this as all one with ‘the whole vast racket of black-marketing, smuggling and commercial corruption that go to make up Chinese business methods… To these people banditry pays, because the police tend to go off looking for the bandits and have not so much time for the supervision of rubber dealers, or, as Lord Mancroft puts it, issuing dog licences.’ Gurney now looked for ‘one or two really big
towkays
’ to prosecute as an example. The son of Tan Cheng Lock, Tan Siew Sin – still a federal legislative councillor and a future finance minister of Malaya – was pulled in. But, Gurney wrote, ‘though he appears shaken we have not yet enough evidence to pick him up’.
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Gurney was well aware of the fragile, divided state of the Chinese community, and this stayed his hand somewhat. In early 1948, at a dinner to celebrate his CBE in the New Year’s honours list, H. S. Lee had called for a unified body of all Malayan Chinese. But he had then been away from the country for nine months of the year, and nothing had happened. The subject arose again at a dinner party with Gurney on 15 December 1948. Now the high commissioner actively encouraged the mostly English-educated Chinese leaders on the Legislative Council to take the initiative. But it was a delicate undertaking. The obvious choice of figurehead was Tan Cheng Lock. He had ruminated on the creation of a ‘Malayan Chinese League’ since the war, but as an anglophone Straits Chinese, he did not command the large personal following of the China-born magnates. Yet the depth of the crisis, and their sudden isolation from China, drew the big men of the Chinese community together as never before, and on 27 February 1949 a Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) was formed. Tan Cheng Lock saw its role as educating the Chinese in a ‘Malayan’ consciousness. But, as a quid pro quo, he argued, the British must acknowledge the Chinese stake in Malaya. As he told the MCA in October: ‘A state which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a state which labours to neutralise, to absorb, or to expel them, destroys its own vitality; a state which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government.’
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Tan saw multiracialism as the natural state of man, but in terms of practical politics the MCA was a communal counterpart to UMNO.
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Its core following – by the end of December 1950 a paper membership of 170,000 – was summoned up by the Chinese-speaking, China-born leaders who commanded the Chambers of Commerce and the clan associations. The MCA was the Kuomintang resurrected in all but name, led by nationalist stalwarts such as H. S. Lee in Selangor and Lau Pak Khuan in Perak. The MCA included some of the wealthiest men in Southeast Asia and, over time, they used it to restore their traditional patronage networks. For example, businessmen now began a concerted campaign to get control of school management committees and oust left-wing influence. In such places, some of the most crucial battles of the insurrection were fought.
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A stated aim of the MCA was ‘to promote and assist in the maintenance of peace and good order’. Gurney insisted on this: he had
originally wanted to use the word ‘collaborate’, but this had evil connotations with the Japanese occupation.
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Gurney saw an opportunity for the state to make a direct connection with its Chinese subjects. The number of ‘Chinese affairs officers’ grew in number, and MCA leaders were co-opted onto ‘Chinese Advisory Committees’. These were the scene of bitter exchanges: businessmen complained of their lack of protection compared to the European mines and estates, and that when they gave information no action was taken.
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The ‘distrust and dislike’ of the police was universal. But, crucially, the MCA was now able to press the cause of squatters and detainees.
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More controversially, some MCA representatives began to embed themselves in screening operations. They selected squatter representatives who would then become MCA representatives in their villages. In turn, the government tried to give special priority to the security of MCA areas.
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Some major figures in the MCA wanted to go further. Leong Yew Koh, a former colonel in the Chinese nationalist army, suggested that 10,000 men be recruited to Malaya from the Kuomintang armies in Taiwan or from those interned in northern Vietnam.
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Tan Cheng Lock rose in the esteem of the British, after their execration of him a year earlier for leading the united front. Gurney, Malcolm MacDonald recollected, had called him ‘gaga’ (Tan was sixty-six years of age). But now both men recognized Tan’s skill in bringing the various factions together and interceding for the community. At a meeting with Gurney at the beginning of April, Tan petitioned for some squatters at Kajang, south of Kuala Lumpur, as ‘good and blameless people’. Gurney asked him if he was leaving to return to Malacca that evening, and ‘he said no, he thought that it was too late in view of possible dangers on the road. I asked him where the dangers lay, he said “Kajang”. Let it be to his credit that he also laughed.’
¹⁰⁸
Within a few days, on 10 April, Tan Cheng Lock was seriously injured, along with the leader of the Perak mine owners, Cheong Chee, by a grenade attack on the Perak MCA office at the Ipoh Chinese Chamber of Commerce. Tan, the British reported, ‘displayed a brilliant sense of occasion, and some may even suspect that he has enjoyed himself immensely’. His journey back to Malacca was a triumphal progress. He was met at each stage with well-wishers and special escorts to protect him. He kept his bloodied shirt as a memento. But his health
never recovered from the injury.
¹⁰⁹
This was one of several attacks on MCA targets; in December, at the funeral of the mother of Cheong Chee, another grenade killed three mourners and injured Lau Pak Khuan and Leong Yew Koh. They ‘knelt before the British bandits, wagging their tails to beg for pity…’, announced the MNLA: ‘shameless “country-selling” thieves. They are racial traitors.’
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But the British had now found a way to hurt the communists. As plans for the mass deportations of squatters looked like collapsing in late 1948, the government began to think in more radical terms: the resettlement en masse of the rural Chinese on the peninsula. A federal committee on squatters was set up in late 1948, and reported in January 1949. Approaching the issue more as one of efficient administration rather than security, it argued that squatters should be settled where they stood. This was a dramatic shift in policy: it proposed giving land wholesale to Chinese peasants for the first time. But the plan ran into a quagmire of opposition from the State governments, in whom control over land was vested. Some Malay bureaucrats argued that squatters should be evicted and left entirely to their own devices. After pressure from the central government, and with large financial incentives, a number of trial initiatives were launched, but they were driven solely by the strategic imperative to remove people from the jungle fringes. One was at Titi, in Negri Sembilan, an area that was virtually an autonomous communist republic during and after the war. It was a site of massacres of villagers by the Japanese, but the district officer, C. E. Howe, looked to emulate some of their methods: ‘The Japs put barbed wire around Titi and Pertang, garrisoned these towns with troops and made all Chinese of the locality live within the defended areas…’, he observed. ‘Could we not try the same idea?’ He immediately had an answer from the local guerrillas, who spread rumours of mass repatriation and extermination camps. The newly formed branch of the MCA was enlisted to help manage the scheme, but its leaders had nocturnal visits from communist guerrillas and all of them withdrew or left town ‘on urgent business’. But at the end of the year the army and police moved in and more than 600 families were uprooted from outlying villages into the town area. Where some tried to remain in their homes they were forcibly ejected and their huts burnt. The resettled farmers had to camp in the
streets and build their own shelter with discounted timber. Much of the promised aid did not materialize. They received little help from their new neighbours, who tried to make money out of them. Titi was now a rural ghetto. The process was taken inexorably to its conclusion when much of the surrounding countryside was declared a ‘no human area’.
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Another early scheme was a colony of around 326 detainees from Majeedi detention camp near Johore Bahru, who were settled at Mawai. There were only ten men aged between twenty and forty among them. The people had no agricultural or household equipment. The MCA had opposed the scheme: it was built on poor soil, close to the jungle’s edge, and they doubted it could be defended. But they gave $100,000 as a token of good faith to support it. In 1951 it was closed. The people, said Tan Cheng Lock, ‘were being treated like cattle’.
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Perhaps as few as 5,000 Chinese were resettled by the end of 1949. But it was the prelude to a vastly more ambitious programme. In Kinta alone 94,000 squatters, that is a third of the population and half of the country folk, were targeted for resettlement. In the peninsula as a whole, by 1954 572,917 people were resettled in 480 ‘New Villages’ and 560,000 more would be ‘regrouped’ on towns and rubber estates. This was the largest planned population relocation in recorded history.

Resettlement was accompanied by a host of new restrictions on persons and on movement: there was a standing curfew from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. which could be extended to all hours if there was trouble; there was no travel except in restricted areas, and no bicycles on public roads after 7 p.m. ‘Food restriction’ areas imposed strict controls on commodities.
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The impact of this was immense. To begin with, not all of those moved were squatters; many had been legitimately occupying land. Squatters who had lost their crops struggled to find work, and when they did it was hard to reach it under curfew conditions. It divided and scattered families, and broke up old communities: the Chinese of Pulai were resettled three times. Reciprocal relations with
kampong
Malays were severed. As a Malay writer, Keris Mas, described it in his short story, ‘A row of shophouses in our village’:

We are to be shifted. We, our families, our livestock, our rice, our loves and our hatreds. Everything.

They say we have been helping the terrorists, helping our young men in the jungle. The shops are the pride of our village, yet they accuse us of setting fire to them so that we would distract the security forces from their pursuit of our boys in the jungle last night.