by Harper, Tim
New Democracy for the first time brought young women leaders to the fore. Chin Peng’s comrade, Eng Ming Chin, became the leading light of the movement in Perak, and Lee Kiu led a Chinese women’s organization in Singapore which, by the end of the year, claimed 20,000 members. The war had made women more visible in the labour force and in trade; it had taken them out of the home. This was not always to their benefit, but it had shown their resilience and exposed their oppression. The experience of ‘comfort women’ and prostitutes was a spur to organization among women of all communities. One of the first resolutions of the MPAJA’s Johore People’s Assembly contained demands for women’s equal rights to inheritance, to equal wages and crèches in the workplace, and for an end to polygamy, prostitution and the keeping of ‘slave-girls’.81 Many Chinese women were attracted to the Communist Party by this preaching of an end to feudalism. For them, this meant a rejection of patriarchal Confucian thought. Party life could be an escape from oppressive households or bad marriages, and it often split families. Above all, perhaps, it was seen as a road to self-development. The MPAJA had shown itself willing to arm women as fighters.82 One Perak newspaper caught the mood: ‘Now Spring had returned to the world we must go hand in hand to unite together, no matter whether we are mistresses or paid-servants, or nonya [Straits Chinese matrons] or labourers or dulang-washers…’83
The MCP built support by tapping into the anarchical self-help of the occupation years, and by making it heroic. By all accounts its success was dramatic and this, for a time, seemed to vindicate Lai Teck. There was a sense that the organization was caught in the full, unstoppable flood of history; in Lai Teck’s words, a ‘revolutionary high tide’ that would bring in its wake the birth of a ‘New Age’. This mood of expectation was taken up by the press with unprecedented freedom. Apart from Japanese propaganda in English and Malay newspapers, the war years were a period of complete isolation and silence. News in Chinese vanished entirely. But in the months after the surrender there was a rush of information from outside that gave local events an almost apocalyptic ring. Although newsprint was in short supply, old newspapers revived quickly with small print runs and the MCP was able to invest in its first mouthpieces: in Singapore the New Democracy and in Kuala Lumpur the Min Sheng Pau – The People’s Voice – the editor of which was Liew Yit Fan, a English-educated Jamaican-born Eurasian Chinese and one of the Party’s most able cadres. Even the older towkay-backed Chinese newspapers, such as Nanyang Siang Pau and the Sin Chew Jit Poh, had editors who were active in the resistance movement, and gave significant coverage to the left. The New Democratic Youth League churned out pamphlets – Victor Gollancz of London was the universal model – ranging from catechisms for the MCP to a best-selling self-help book (How to treat people). Literary periodicals revived, stimulated by the poetic offerings of MPAJA veterans, in the mode according to one British reader, of ‘reminiscences under a sombre sky, then the eternal “running dogs” of the Japanese’.84 Writers celebrated the lack of censorship by launching a kind of guerrilla journalism against the BMA. This was duly translated daily by the government PR department for the military to read. They were incensed at the public ridicule. Papers countered with teasing apologies: ‘We are surprised at your Honours being offended by our remark that your Honour is oppressive, cruel, unjust and insincere, and we hope that your Honour will forgive our ignorance.’85 The soldiers were not amused.
Not only the British were alarmed at the headway the communists had made, so too as they began to resurface were Chinese businessmen, most of whom were instinctive supporters of the rival Kuomintang. The nationalists’ few Force 136 fighters were marginalized by both the British and the MPAJA. The Kuomintang attempted to set up its own youth groups and make its presence felt. Senior nationalist leaders, businessmen and opinion-makers began to drift back from exile. The one man whose moral authority transcended the political cleavages among the Overseas Chinese was Tan Kah Kee. On 6 October, he returned to Singapore from Java, where – as Japan’s Public Enemy No. 1 – he had spent the war in hiding. In the traditional manner, a party was given the next evening to greet him in his old residence, the ‘millionaires club’, the Ee Hoe Hean. At seventy-one years of age, Tan Kah Kee was now a great patriarch. Victor Purcell attended the gathering; the spectrum of guests, he noted, was ‘unprecedented’: there was a full turn-out of dignitaries from the various Chinese clan and commercial associations over which Tan Kah Kee had once held sway, but the guests now included Wu Tian Wang and Lee Kiu, as representatives of the Malayan Communist Party. Tan Kah Kee made a speech criticizing the low price of rubber and made a plea for the abolition of opium and cabarets, his old bugbears. Surveying the crowd, Purcell speculated that Tan Kah Kee could well turn out to be ‘the George Washington of a Nanyang Chinese independence movement’. But Purcell also noted that, although Tan Kah Kee’s anti-Japanese credentials were unimpeachable, he was in very many ways out of touch with local conditions. His theme, Purcell recorded, remained ‘the drawing off of Malayan wealth for China’ and ‘Malaya for the Chinese’. In the propaganda of the communists, Purcell observed, ‘there is no mention of any one race’. The Party was beginning to turn away from its core Chinese support base and becoming more ‘Malayan’ in its outlook. But, at the same time, its peaceful co-existence with the British was coming rapidly to an end. As the meeting to welcome Tan Kah Kee drew to a close, it was disturbed by news of police raids on the nearby premises of the New Democratic Youth League.86
LIBERAL IMPERIALISM ANDNEW DEMOCRACY
The new freedom to meet and to march had raised political expectations to fever pitch. Victor Purcell, together with a number of other ‘wise Britishers’, was for a short time lionized by the Chinese press for having endorsed the ‘Eight Principles’ of the Malayan Communist Party. He was now facing intense criticism from his British colleagues: a senior policeman wrote to Mountbatten demanding that Purcell be removed from his post with immediate effect.87 But Purcell reiterated in a radio broadcast that ‘Liberty of speech is allowed which extends to the right to criticize government measures of policy in the strongest terms.’88 A few days after Tan Kah Kee’s return, Purcell left Singapore to travel around the peninsula to take in the political air. His impressions were recorded in an irreverent personal journal, which he circulated to senior members of the BMA. Intended to rally support for the liberal experiment, it began to chart its demise.
Purcell went first to Malacca, the ancestral home of Malaya’s largest community of Straits Chinese. It was, he observed, ‘still the same old Sleepy Hollow’. But surrounded by antique Chinese mansions and an air of decline, Purcell saw how the Straits Chinese elite had lost a great deal of their wealth and influence to newer men. At Malacca’s ‘Double Tenth’ celebrations, the triumphal arches for the occasion were those erected to welcome the MPAJA a few weeks earlier; they had merely been reinscribed. As he moved north, the political atmosphere became heavier. Kuala Lumpur ‘had an unquiet air’: Purcell noticed the constant passage through the streets of MPAJA men. The centre of this frenzy of activity was the People’s Assembly which had been set up in the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall. Here the communists had gone furthest in attempting to maintain a shadow local government, including a Treasury and a Department of Civil and Cultural Affairs. Although its core support remained Chinese, the Assembly had representatives from all the main ethnic communities.89 It was led by a hardened ex-guerrilla leader, Soong Kwong, who discarded the MPAJA’s preferred banditti battledress style of the previous weeks and cut a flamboyant figure in a pristine white linen suit.
Purcell arrived at a tense moment. The editors of the Min Sheng Pau had been rebuked by the military for criticizing arrests made in the police raids in Singapore a few days earlier. Then, on 13 October, 6,000 workers went on strike out at Malaya’s only coal mine at Batu Arang. This was a serious challenge to the British: before the war the mine had been the scene of Malaya’s most dramatic industrial unrest, and of the MCP’s first attempt
to set up soviets. Purcell visited the mine and implored the workers to be patient. ‘The men’s reply was that they could not work on empty bellies. There was a deadlock.’ This triggered a wave of industrial action: in the small-town strongholds of the MPAJA there were processions led by guerrillas, with ardent young Chinese as flying pickets. In Singapore, on 20 October, 7,000 harbour workers protested at the return of the contractor system. But the strike here took on an entirely new dimension: British troops were embarking from the docks for Indonesia, and the labour gangs refused to load materials of war. The British declined to listen to what they perceived to be political demands. It was reported that the European manager threatened the men with arrest and three years’ imprisonment under military law. ‘If you people don’t want to work’, they were told, ‘we have British soldiers and Japanese prisoners of war.’ The BMA drafted in 2,000 Japanese surrendered personnel, and over the next few days the strikes spread through the city to other transport and municipal workers, including the collectors of night soil and firemen; even 300 cabaret girls stopped dancing. At a vast rally of 20,000 workers at Happy World amusement park, fifty unions turned out in solidarity. Japanese troops were now out cleaning the streets and fighting fires.90
These disputes set the pattern for three years of deepening industrial conflict. With communist support, the General Labour Unions of the pre-war period began to revive. Where before they had been underground movements, they now set up offices in resistance organization buildings. They were not confined to single trades; they amalgamated workers in artisan or service industries who were employed in small, dispersed clusters and who saw the need to form larger combines. The Singapore General Labour Union, inaugurated at the 25 October Happy World rally, claimed a membership of 100,000 workers from over seventy individual bodies, most of whom earned a mere 50¢to $1 a day. The General Labour Unions brought together smaller unions of hawkers and trishaw riders to fight British attempts to clean up the streets, and unions of shop assistants and waiters whose livelihood was threatened by government food control measures. They represented the invisible city and gained support through its defence of the informal economy. As shortages worsened in December, the strikes engulfed hospital attendants, taxi and bus drivers, clerks, mechanics, telephone workers, postmen and government clerks. The unions were formidable combinations of workers, and stoppages in one sector could easily escalate to become general strikes.
The British claimed that the MCP was orchestrating these campaigns by intimidation; certainly few labourers dared oppose them. But much of the labour organization was spontaneous. Subhas Chandra Bose’s great achievement in Malaya was that, in S. K. Chettur’s words, ‘he infused dignity and self-respect’ into Indian labour. His loss had caused widespread demoralization but, by the end of 1945, independent Indian unions were being formed and the Azad Hind movement was reassembling on the rubber estates. Desperate to encourage moderate trade unionism, the Labour government created an entirely novel government position. At the end of December a ‘trade union adviser’ arrived in Singapore. ‘Battling Jack’ Brazier was a cockney railwayman who had driven the Bournemouth Belle. A product of Ruskin College Oxford, he was a passionate socialist and anti-colonialist, but also a committed anti-communist, probably from religious conviction, and he adopted the view that unions should restrict themselves solely to economic matters, and play no political role.91 Purcell demurred. ‘There is’, he wrote, ‘no need to sniff about political agitators to explain a refusal to work when the cost of living at the lowest pre-occupation standards is higher than wages.’
The distinction between rice and freedom was incomprehensible to local unionists. There seemed to be no other forum in which political issues could be debated. At Purcell’s suggestion the MCP was allowed representation on the official Advisory Councils. But if they hoped to use this to make speeches, they were disappointed; the agenda was strictly apolitical and the membership dominated by local worthies. Purcell witnessed the frustration at first hand in Kuala Lumpur. The day before Purcell’s visit, on 12 October 1945, the leader of the People’s Assembly, Soong Kwong, was arrested by RAF police on a charge of extortion. There is little doubt as to Soong Kwong’s guilt. His Chinese victim was a known Japanese informant who was imprisoned in a basement for a week by Soong Kwong and his followers and released only after he agreed to produce a ‘fine’ of $300,000. But there was a large rally of Soong Kwong’s outraged supporters on the Kuala Lumpur Padang on 15 October. The issue at stake was the status of the MPAJA. The extortion had occurred before the surrender when Soong Kwong was a guerrilla leader and a combatant under the command of SEAC. The BMA had earlier decided to overlook the violent episodes of the interregnum, but it seems that the RAF police had acted on their own initiative. On the afternoon of the rally, Soong Kwong was released on bail. He confronted Purcell and other British officers: ‘Did not the BMA realise that he, Soong Kwong, was the people’s leader?’ Purcell was not impressed, describing him as ‘a bit of a dandy. His is a common type among Chinese “intellectuals” of the semi-cooked variety – vain, grinning, dealing in impertinences with ingratiating smirks and yet with a slight sneer behind the grin… He will’, Purcell foretold, ‘court a comfortable martyrdom from the British.’ ‘Chan Hoon and Wu [Tian Wang]’, Purcell noted, ‘are quite different types and quite reasonable.’
The reference to ‘Chan Hoon’ (i.e. ‘Chang Hong’) is telling. Purcell had met ‘Chang Hong’ and other senior British officers in Singapore on 24 and 25 September; they had discussed co-operation with the BMA and ‘Chang’ had then introduced Wu Tian Wang and other Singapore Party leaders. But it seems that the British did not discern Chang’s true identity, and he then disappeared from view. Of the man the British knew as Lai Teck there was now no sign. Rumours about him continued to circulate, and they broke into print in the Penang newspaper, Modern Daily News, in October. An anonymous article accused an unnamed official of the MCP of betraying comrades to the Japanese. It called for a public investigation at which the author would appear and give evidence. It was written by Ng Yeh Lu, who had been perhaps the most prominent public spokesman of the MCP before the war. It was he who had represented the Party in discussions that led to the British arming the Chinese for a last-ditch defence of Singapore. Although he was never a Central Committee member, he was English speaking and a formidable polemicist. After the fall of Singapore, Ng Yeh Lu was arrested by the Kempeitai; he was detained and then worked for the Japanese as a court translator. It was at this point that he became aware of Lai Teck’s treachery, but Ng Yeh Lu’s own record discredited his testimony in the eyes of most Party members. It seems that he had been kept alive by the Japanese for this very purpose. Yet it was Lai Teck who had remained at large and in a position to expose his comrades. Ng Yeh Lu – or ‘Yellow Wong,’ as he was now known – never regained standing in the MCP. There was a report that Lai Teck attempted to have him assassinated by the Singapore Party, but the local leaders stayed their hand.92
There were signs of dissent within the Party. A flurry of statements by various MCP organs appeared in the press enquiring after the health of ‘Mr Light’ or ‘Mr Wright’ and paying glowing tributes to his leadership. Eng Ming Chin, at a tea party in Ipoh in late November, made a speech in which she ‘exposed the conspirators against Lai Teck’.93 But other leading Party figures began to act on their suspicions. Yeung Kuo, the Party leader in Selangor, disenchanted with the moderate policy followed in August, managed to orchestrate the exclusion of Lai Teck from the MCP’s key organizing committee. But Lai Teck still possessed an aura of invulnerability, and fought back. It is unclear how much the British knew about all this. The first hard evidence seems to have come to H. T. Pagden, an etymologist by training, who was working as a Chinese-affairs officer in Singapore. He was given a detailed report, written by Ng Yeh Lu, which itemized Lai Teck’s treacheries including the massacre of the MPAJA high command at Batu Caves in 1942 and the betrayal of Force 136 officers. Among the latter wa
s the Chinese Kuomintang agent Lim Bo Seng. In December Lim’s remains were exhumed from the grounds of Batu Gajah prison in Perak, where he had died at the hands of the Kempeitai. There was a public funeral in Ipoh, from where the cortège proceeded to Kuala Lumpur and then Singapore for a moving commemoration ceremony. He was, observed Victor Purcell, ‘already a legend’.94 Around this time Pagden was visited by a senior Kuomintang leader, a close friend of Lim Bo Seng, who threatened that, if the British did not bring Lai Teck to trial, ‘certain people would probably make it their business to put the matter in the limelight’. Pagden took the matter to the head of the Malayan Security Service, A. G. Blades, a pre-war policeman who had known Lai Teck. Pagden suggested that Lai Teck’s Kempeitai controller, Satoru Onishi, now imprisoned in Changi, be interrogated. ‘As an etymologist, however,’ he wrote some three years later, ‘I was not in a very strong position.’ Pagden was told in no uncertain terms to drop the matter and the Kuomintang, he believed, were pressured into silence and told to leave matters to the police. But Pagden sowed seeds of doubt: ‘The Malayan Security Service’, he told the Colonial Office, believed they knew ‘more about [Lai Teck] than anyone, but I am not sure that they do. They probably find him useful, but one wonders how useful this association with him may be to the other side.’95
By December 1945 the British were aware that Lai Teck was still alive. Once again, his story becomes obscured by a lack of sources, and by misinformation at every turn. But, from scraps of evidence in the official papers, it appears that knowledge of Lai Teck was confined to a small circle of initiates within the Malayan Security Service. A field security officer, Major R. J. Isaacs, opened a file on ‘The Wright Case’ and began to interview MCP members to discover what had happened to him, and to investigate his wartime activities. Members of the Kempeitai in British custody were asked to write down all they knew about the Malayan Communist Party. According to Onishi, Issacs visited him to seek his opinion.96 Then a key witness committed suicide at Isaacs’s house. With an impending inquest there was a danger that Isaacs and other witnesses might be put on the stand, and that information might come to light that would compromise the Security Service. It would also embarrass the British officers of Force 136 who, although they had known nothing of Lai Teck’s relationship with the Japanese, now had to confront the probability that they had inadvertently passed on military information to the Japanese. Force 136, too, was now a legend. At this point, the ‘Wright Case’ quietly dropped from view. It appears that it was not until early 1946 that Lai Teck was once more in contact with the British.97