Forgotten Wars (82 page)

Yet the Emergency was not – as invariably presented, then and since – a British victory. Nor is the history of Malaya in this period solely the history of the Emergency. The forest war erupted out of a series of conflicts within Malayan society that had their origins in the Japanese war, and it was upon these that the fate of the revolution ultimately rested. Although the MNLA in the forest claimed to fight for the
‘nation’, there were other ‘nations of intent’ being voiced, other parallel struggles for freedom underway. These too were at their defining hour, and their course could no longer be dictated by the British. The main thrust of colonial high policy between 1945 and 1948 had been to weld Malaya more closely to the British Empire. There was vague talk about self-government – it was written into the federal constitution – but it was clear that the British were thinking in terms of twenty-five years. Now the British seemed cut adrift by events. But there was a remarkable underlying continuity to political aims and a quickening of political vision. In early 1949 there was talk that the British were preparing to abandon Malaya to its fate. This reached the ears of the deputy leader of the opposition, Anthony Eden, who was visiting the country at the time. This provoked Attlee to stand in the House of Commons on 13 April and announce that Britain would not leave Malaya until the insurrection was defeated. But this was also a public commitment to self-government, and it was no longer a distant prospect, but a fact of life. This was no sudden political decision to withdraw; but there was a change of mindset; an acknowledgement that Britain had lost the ability to dictate the pace of events. By mid 1950, MacDonald acknowledged, it was clear that Malay politicians were now thinking of fifteen years, ‘and there is now a tendency that the transition to self-government will have to be speeded up’. He also recognized that it would ‘inevitably be accelerated by factors over which we shall have little or no control’.
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In such circumstances it was vital that Britain’s local allies were firmly secured, but this entailed a concession of initiative to them which became a slow but steady haemorrhaging of power.

The clearest sign that the British had recognized the inevitable in Malaya was their obsession with placating Dato Onn bin Jaafar. In 1949 the turbulent and temperamental Malay leader still seemed to command the open political scene. Britain’s reliance on UMNO had grown during the Emergency. The party was strengthened by the arrest of its opponents; the police provided a good living for tens of thousands of young Malays and gave UMNO ‘a larger ready-made well-controlled audience which would not otherwise had been readily available’.
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In the face of reports of Malays taking to the jungle, it was ultimately Britain’s final line of defence in Malaya. But the British
could not take the mercurial Onn for granted. In 1948 there were a series of clashes between the British and the Malay State administrations, principally over land for Chinese squatters. In the middle of the year Onn looked set to resign from the Legislative Council. In December 1948 his frustrations spilled over during a visit to London. As a senior mandarin, John Paskin, told Gurney: ‘I don’t think any of us were quite prepared… for the degree of bitterness, under which he still labours, at what was done in 1945/6…’ Stopping just short of an ultimatum, Onn made it clear that the British had yet to prove themselves; he demanded tangible evidence of Britain’s ‘special responsibility towards the Malays’. ‘We have’, the British were told, ‘reached the stage when only deeds and not merely assurances would tell’. He suggested a gift of £10m as restitution to the Malays, for their development. The Emergency had raised Onn’s ire: Britain’s ‘first thought is, “What will the Chinese think about it?”, whereas it ought to be, “What will the Malays think about it?”’
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Yet despite Onn’s ‘disconcerting quirks’, Whitehall was convinced that ‘he has the makings of a statesman’; that he was ‘capable of a broader vision, and was a man with whom (except on the subject of our “misdeeds” of 1945/6) one could reason’.
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Throughout 1949 Onn continued to snipe at the ‘authoritarian’ federal administration and his ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ personality infuriated Gurney. But the British had made it clear that a solution to what they now termed the ‘communal issue’ was a condition of political development, and Onn seemed the man most likely to deliver it.

The first steps came at the end of 1948, with Onn’s return from London. Inspired by his attendance at the World Conference on Moral Rearmament, a well-connected Straits Chinese schoolteacher, Thio Chan Bee, attempted to apply its principles to inter-ethnic tensions in Malaya. This was not a new idea. Civic movements like Rotary and Kiwanis were taking root among the middle classes. Onn himself had encountered Moral Rearmament on a sojourn at the World Trade Fair in San Francisco in 1939, where he had run the Johore pavilion. The industrialist Lee Kong Chian had attended a Moral Rearmament conference in the United States on the recommendation of President Truman himself. It chimed too with recent speeches of Malcolm MacDonald, who agreed to act as honest broker. Thio Chan Bee used his
offices to bring Onn and Tan Cheng Lock and their followings together for the first time. The meeting was carefully choreographed. Eleven Chinese leaders met beforehand at the Singapore Garden Club, where even the issue of whether Tan Cheng Lock should bring himself to thank the host for dinner was a matter for discussion. They then travelled to Onn’s residence in Johore Bahru, where many of the leading Malays of the south were gathered. Onn and MacDonald met them at the door. The meeting was tense: the leading Malayans were strangers to each other. Tan Cheng Lock broke the ice by reciting Malay
pantuns
, playful lyrical quatrains. The discussion then became open and frank. It hinged on a key issue: ‘The Chinese have economic power. The Malays now have political power. If the Chinese will help the Malays to rise economically, then surely the Malays must share with the Chinese their political power.’ The meeting was secret, but a more formal gathering was arranged at the wedding of a Malay notable in Penang in January. It was the first time that Malays had crossed the threshold of the Chinese Corner Club in Northam Road.
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The meetings continued for the rest of 1949, and into the following year. Those attending became known as the Communities Liaison Committee, and membership was broadened to include a Ceylonese lawyer, E. E. C. Thuraisingham. It had no official standing, nor were its proceedings ever made public, but it began a process whereby the core issues of state would be ironed out,
in camera
, by representatives of the two main ethnic communities.
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The first crucial meetings in 1949 were dominated by Malay resentment at the Chinese stranglehold on Asian commerce in Malaya. In a testy meeting in Kuala Lumpur in late February, the Chinese leaders sat through a strongly worded attack by the Perak leader of UMNO, Abdul Wahab. Historically, he argued, the Malays were well represented in the economy, but they had lost commercial control. He inveighed against ‘the use of strangulation methods’ by Chinese businesses: the lending of money to ‘infiltrate’ the economy; the use of syndicates to control prices, short weights and ‘systematic corruption’. ‘The Malays,’ he said, ‘who used to be a proud race, were forced to begging and the ultimate results of all this would be discontent, jealously and hatred.’ The response of Tan Cheng Lock was measured: ‘Not only the Malays are suffering,’ he said. ‘There are many Chinese suffering.’ But he
enunciated a clear principle: ‘In the common interest of Malaya, it is of paramount importance that the non-Malays shall make every endeavour to co-operate amongst themselves and with the Malays to improve the economic position of the Malays so that they, the Malays, can take their rightful and proper place and share fully in the economic life of Malaya.’ The debate centred on quotas for the Malays in key sectors: transport for Malays to get their goods to market, and bus routes, a symbolic area where Malays had once been leading entrepreneurs, but had been dislodged since the war. This approach would have an enduring legacy for the post-colonial development of Malaya. It defined the ‘new paternalism’ of the elite: the combination of a bureaucratic and communal approach to economic problems with a capitalist vision for Malaya’s future.
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The Committee also reopened the debate on the meaning of citizenship and nationality that had proved so incendiary in 1947. In August 1949 the following questions were posed: ‘Is the ultimate aim a United Malayan Nation?’ ‘What is meant by the “special position” of the Malays?’ ‘Should there be equality of status, privilege and opportunity between federal citizens (in due course to Malayan nationals)?’ As Tan Cheng Lock argued, ‘I do not say that the special position should not be upheld, but in what direction? Is there going to be inequality as between the citizens themselves or are they to be on an equal footing?’ Onn responded that it was not so much the equality of citizenship that was at stake, but the principle that ‘the Malay’s allegiance to this country came before anybody else’. A Chinese might have a physical home in Malaya and also a spiritual home elsewhere, but for the Malays the two were inseparable. Malay leaders questioned whether a Chinese, in principle, could place his spiritual loyalty in Malaya, and even if this were conceded, how could it be done without jeopardizing the position of the Malays? But Onn now went further than he had ever gone before in conceding a nationality for non-Malays: ‘The Malay feeling has changed, and they do accept the principle provided that [the non-Malays] are prepared to give undivided loyalty.’
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In subsequent meetings the basis of common nationality was hammered out. A proposal began to emerge, based on a technical provision of the Nationality Bill of the State of Johore, whereby a subject of the ruler automatically became a federal citizen. Could this,
it was suggested, be extended more widely to Chinese? One obstacle was the rulers themselves. As the legal adviser to UMNO, Roland Braddell, put it: ‘The other rulers would not have it at any price… They were Muhammadan rulers and they wanted Muhammadans. He did not know if the rulers ever heard of the idea of nationality.’
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In mid August thousands of Malays descended on the royal town of Kuala Kangsar for the installation of the 33rd Sultan of Perak. Significantly, a representative of the Chinese squatters was invited for the first time to attend the ceremony. The Perak line was traced back to the last Sultan of Melaka, deposed by the Portuguese in 1511. The state regalia included the
kris
of the Malay hero Hang Tuah and a sword said to have belonged to Alexander the Great. It was a striking display of the
daulat
, or the aura of a sultan.
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But Onn was increasingly impatient with the rulers. The next month, at a speech to the UMNO general assembly at Arau in Perlis, Onn floated proposals for a Malayan nationality without consulting them, and reminded them that he had saved their thrones in 1946. This angered them deeply, especially the Sultan of Kedah, whose state was a rival centre of Malay politics. The rulers retaliated by opposing a tentative proposal from the British to appoint a Malay deputy high commissioner, who would most likely be Onn himself; they refused to accept a commoner elevated to a status above them. Onn resigned shortly afterwards as chief minister of Johore. In the face of this obstruction, Onn’s latent radicalism resurfaced. He told UMNO’s youth wing at a rally at Butterworth on 26 August that ‘the days of feudal rule are over. We are in the age of democratic and constitutional rule.’
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But Onn was finding it difficult to reconcile his reputation as the sole spokesman of the Malays with his conviction that the political struggle must now be broadened to include others. He was losing patience with UMNO, and saw it as too narrow for his ambitions. He was moving ahead of Malay opinion.

At a meeting in Penang over 29–31 December, from which Onn was absent, other senior Malay leaders rounded on the citizenship proposals. ‘Our Malay friends’, Tan Cheng Lock complained to a colleague, ‘seem to think that the Chinese are born criminals or inherently wicked, that whatever we do in this country is inherently wrong.’ But the situation was saved by a formula in Tan’s words: ‘Only
when the Chinese acknowledge the same sovereigns as the Malays do, can they demonstrate their wish to be the equals of the Malays.’
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On the basis of this, the principle of
jus soli
was conceded by Malay leaders. These resolutions were never enshrined in any binding agreement; they remained a private understanding among the elite. Yet the ‘communal bargain’ that emerged set the terms of political debate for many years to come. It encouraged the British to move forward with a draft development plan: the first of a series of five-year plans. They also set up a rural development agency for the Malays, which Onn would head. It did not eradicate, or even much reduce Malay poverty, but it gave a clear sign to the UMNO leaders of the rewards of patronage that were to be reaped. By the end of the year, the British were laying plans for a system of Asian shadow ministers, or ‘Members’. The lineaments of the post-colonial order were coming into relief.

This fragile alliance of ethnic interests was not the ‘multiracial’ nationalism that British idealists had wanted to fashion. This now seemed much further away than it had in 1945, and Gurney, for one, was deeply pessimistic that a truly ‘Malayan’ consciousness would ever emerge: its future lay in education and in the young. Not least of the battles of the Emergency was the struggle for the imagination of the new generation; the men and women who were to lead Malaya to independence. But this was also the generation that had been exposed to the full force of Japanese cultural warfare, to the mystique of patriotic resistance and the general assault on the corrupt, colonialist mentalities. The British tended to portray radical nationalists as emotional adolescents and communists as vicious delinquents. They recoiled at the indiscipline and hostility ‘already noticeable in everyday street contact between Europeans and Chinese of the urchin variety or coolies who now often go out of their way to be rude without the least provocation.’
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The schools themselves – the large Chinese high schools of Singapore and Penang in particular – were dominated by over-age students who had missed out on formal education during the war. Their schooling had been on the streets, in petty trade and
politics. Most were old beyond their years, and resented that the only path to advancement in a colonial world was the English language. They did not see their future as becoming clerks in British companies. Often with the connivance of teachers, classmates set up study cells and circulated clandestine political writings. They devoured the patriotic literature of the National Salvation movement, but also Russian authors – Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Gorky – in cheap Chinese translations. It was, as one activist was later to recall, ‘an eclectic mix of romantic, naturalist and realist writers, who wrote of oppression, struggle and freedom. It was a heady literary diet, quite different from the staple fare most English-educated students were exposed or accustomed to.’
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In their spare time students remained part of the labour force, in which they were seen as something of an elite. Student broadsheets and hustings were schools for activism, and their leaders were the natural vanguard of a new wave of radical trade unionism. In 1955, when Singapore island was once again crippled by strikes, the governor struggled to explain to the colonial secretary why the British government was being held hostage by children.
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