by Harper, Tim
The cause of Indonesia was kept alive in Malaya by the presence of the 15,000 Dutch soldiers and ex-internees who were based in Singapore by the end of 1945, and some 2,000 more upcountry.12 The refugees were traumatized and bitter: they were the first of some 300,000 lost children of empire who would travel into exile in the Netherlands, and then on to the United States or Australia.13 As SEAC prepared to wind up its operations by the end of November 1946, the Dutch shipped in 75,000 men to keep order in Java and Sumatra, and many of them came through Singapore. Eventually, over 140,000 Dutch were mobilized for De Grote Oost–an extraordinary commitment for a nation that had a population of only 1,750,000 men of military age – and there were Dutch camps in Malaya until 1948.14 The main civilian settlement in Singapore, Wilhelmina Camp, was a substantial township with its own radio station, cinema and orchestra. But it was adjacent to the Malay settlement of Geylang, and in mid 1946, as Dutch operations intensified in Indonesia, there were Dutch–Malay clashes in the neutral ground between the two areas: the Happy World amusement park. There was fighting in its bars, cabarets and even at the Bolero Malay Opera. An NCO, his wife and another Dutchman were killed. Tensions between Menadonese and Amboinese troops and local Malays nearly escalated out of control, as the Malays threatened to call in compatriots in the services to ‘stage a real battle’. The violence was usually triggered by soldiers’ improper conduct towards respectable Malay women, although Dutch intelligence suggested that its origins were political, and that it was orchestrated by local Indonesians.15 Dutch agents were at work across Malaya; Mustapha Hussain was approached by a European and offered $1,000 a month to spy on ‘pro-Indonesia’ supporters in Perak.16
In this way Indonesia’s struggle became part of the daily lives of Malays. Geylang was a place of transit for many refugees; it was also close to the camps of romusha labourers. It was a crowded and volatile world – poor Indonesians were still dying on the streets – but compared with Java it was a safe haven. One of the first political organizations to be founded in post-war Malaya was an Indonesian Labour Party, that worked to organize and repatriate the labourers. It set up an office in the Arab Street area, near the palace of the last, exiled ruler of the Johor-Riau empire that had once held sway across the colonial borders of the region. There was a short-lived attempt to revive the sultanate, and Singapore remained a symbolic centre of the entire Malay world: a crossroads for traders and craftsmen, scholars and writers, religious teachers and pilgrims, especially after the hajj to Mecca began to revive. With the arrival of Mountbatten Singapore became an important diplomatic centre and home to the Republic of Indonesia’s main external office.17 One of the many arrivals in 1946 was the 27-year-old Khatijah Sidek, a spirited, independent Minangkabau woman, educated at Padang Panjang in western Sumatra, a dynamic centre of modernist Islamic learning. She was one of the leaders of the controversial Puteri Kesatri, the women fighters of the revolution, who had challenged traditional roles in a dramatic way. On the prompting of exiles from Malaya, Khatijah decided to take her message of emancipation to Singapore. She arrived without funds but, with the help of local associations, travelled around Malaya lecturing to women of all communities, from the wives of the urban elite to peasant women in the Malay kampongs. The British were becoming increasingly alarmed by the activities of such people. ‘Whenever we made a speech’, Khatijah wrote, ‘the police and the Special Branch were there too, and the Malay people themselves advised us not to make our speeches too strong or too “hot” because Malaya was different from Indonesia; and it was not only the common people who advised us thus, but also the leaders… in those days they were very afraid to hear the word Merdeka, which we from Indonesia spoke of constantly.’18
But it was a two-way traffic. Many Malay radicals travelled to Indonesia and fought in the revolution, and what the British now began to describe obsessively as ‘Indonesian influence’ was often an expression of a local vision of a greater Malay nation.19 Young leaders such as Ahmad Boestamam cultivated the pemuda style. Malay orators took Sukarno as a model – ‘that Ox and Lion of the Indonesian podium’ – although Boestamam himself, perhaps the most effective platform speaker of his generation, claimed that his greatest inspiration was Subhas Chandra Bose.20 On 17 February 1946, the six-month anniversary of the Indonesian revolution, Boestamam founded the Angkatan Pemuda Insaf – the Generation of Aware Youth. It was known – as were many Malay associations in this period – by its dramatic acronym, API, which meant ‘fire’. Within the space of a few days he and his friends assembled around 500 young Malays, many of whom had received Japanese basic military training, and paraded at Jubilee Park, Ipoh, in red and white armbands that mirrored the Sang Saka Merah Putih flag of Indonesia. Although it kept its separate identity, API became the youth wing of the Malay Nationalist Party, and supplied many of its activists. The MNP was now a national force. Shortly after the foundation of API it moved its office to a shophouse in Batu Road, Kuala Lumpur, and the young radicals began to live in a communal fashion in a rented house in nearby Kampong Bahru which became known as ‘Hotel Merdeka’. Here they were joined by a young woman from Negri Sembilan, Shamsiah Fakeh, another graduate of a religious school, who slept next to the stove and took over the women’s section of the party. She created a sister organization to API: the Angkatan Wanita Sedar – Generation of Aware Women – or AWAS, ‘look out!’ With this cry, its members would raise their clenched right fist with the index finger extended as a warning sign. The women goaded the men, and encouraged wives of non-politically minded husbands to go on strike from their domestic duties.21
The Malay Nationalist Party also began to attract the support of leading Malay intellectuals of an older, pre-pemuda generation. Mockhtaruddin Lasso, a shadowy figure to the end, disappeared suddenly in early 1946, and little other than rumour was heard of him again. The new chairman, Dr Burhanuddin al-Helmy, was forty-five years of age; he had been schooled at the Penang madrasah of the great Malay modernist reformer Syed Sheihk al-Hadi, and then spent a long sojourn in India, training in homoeopathic medicine at Ismaileah Medical College in Hyderabad, and the Anglo-Muslim College at Aligarh. In India, he had met Jinnah, and became very interested in the cause of Palestine.22 ‘Pak Doktor’, as he was dubbed, possessed an Islamic cosmopolitanism that was unequalled among Malay political leaders, and his nationalism was religiously grounded. Within the MNP different traditions of radical thought were beginning to assemble under the same banner. Malay cadres of the Malayan Communist Party were also regular visitors to ‘Hotel Merdeka’. The most prominent of these were two Perak Malays, Rashid Maidin and Abdullah Che Dat. Rashid, aged twenty-eight, had worked for a mining company as an electrical technician whilst taking a correspondence course in English. He had been recruited into the MCP by Tu Lung Shan, Chin Peng and Eng Ming Chin’s mentor, and had worked as an underground publicist during the war. The 23-year-old Abdullah C.D., as he was known in the party, had attended Clifford School, an English school in Kuala Kangsar. He had been a member of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda but left the movement in protest at its cooperation with the Japanese and instead worked among the Malays for the MPAJA. In the dark days of communal violence, Rashid Maidin and Abdullah C.D. toured the Perak river with Eng Ming Chin’s propaganda troupe to allay Malay fears and broker local understandings. Over the next two years the communists would invest a tremendous amount in the Malay Nationalist Party: it symbolized its growing commitment to ‘Malayanization’ and substantiated its claim to patriotism. In the MNP, Abdullah later wrote, there were ‘branches of many aliran [flows of consciousness] – nationalist, religious, socialist, communist. Yet by taking our aliran out of the equation, we were able to set aside differences, able to unite and cooperate. This was for the sake of a patriotic front that was anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist and loving independence, freedom.’23
THE PASSING OF THE MALAYAN SPRING
The first weeks of 1946 were a period of unprecedented political freedom and experiment that would later
become known as the Malayan Spring. The phrase was coined by Han Suyin, a novelist who came to Malaya in 1952. She calculated that around fourteen books of poetry, ninety-six novels – a new form in Malayan Chinese literature – and forty-eight books of essays appeared in Chinese in this period, though by the time of her arrival six years later the parameters of open public debate had shrunk dramatically. To her eyes, intellectual life seemed to have been obliterated entirely, and ‘Special Branch was The Power’. She found that much that had been written in the immediate post-war years was no longer available; the authors could not be traced or, if they could, denied that they had ever written anything.24 But at the time the Malayan Spring was a significant shift in mood, and perhaps more enduring than Han Suyin realized. One writer, styling himself ‘Fu-sheng’, or ‘Revival’, described the change in an essay in New Democracy that marked the fourth anniversary of the Japanese invasion of Malaya, or ‘Twelve-Eight’, as it was now called. Before the war, he wrote, the Chinese in Malaya were ‘just an overseas Chinese and nothing more’.
Then the British lost Malaya in just two months and a week, and the duty of beating the Japanese and regaining Malaya fell on the Malayan people, especially on us Chinese. And so Malaya was reborn thanks to the blood of the Chinese and other revolutionary warriors. The fates of Malaya and our mother country are related. We fight for Malaya and our mother country, while the people of our mother country fight for the country and for Malaya. The mother country is ours, but in Malaya also we have our share. There is a testimony of blood which no one can gainsay.
The local landscape was now poignant with memory; the local situation a microcosm of Asian history and current politics. In the past, Fu-sheng wrote, three races – China, India and Indonesia – had ruled half the globe and now they came together in Malaya. The ‘three big races’ of Malaya – the Chinese, Indians and Malays – were like the three Great Powers at Yalta. They had a shared destiny. ‘Peace is indivisible; so is the fate of Malaya, China, India and Indonesia.’25 Whilst Chinese writing in Malaya tended to claim a leading role for the Chinese in the political struggle in Malaya – for Chinese rights as ‘pioneers’ – it remained divided on how far this struggle was for Malaya. But through the prism of the resistance struggle, Chinese writers and intellectuals explored their surroundings with a new emotion and purpose, and debates on identity and emancipation were conducted with a new urgency.
One of the key figures in this revival was the writer and journalist Hu Yuzhi. Educated in Paris and a leading luminary of the Shanghai intellectual scene, he had, along with many other ‘refugee writers’, fled from China to Singapore in 1940. This influx of sophisticates was a minor revolution in a society that for the most part comprised labourers and traders, and, for their part, the writers saw the Nanyang as an artistic utopia. Hu Yuzhi later admitted that he was secretly a member of the Chinese Communist Party sent to Singapore to intensify propaganda work in the Nanyang. He spent the war in hiding in Sumatra, running a wine-brewing factory with a fellow-exile, the celebrated modernist novelist and poet Yu Dafu. Yu was killed by the Japanese in the interregnum: he was witness to too many of their brutalities. This loss would haunt Chinese writing in Malaya after the war, and writers composed multiple laments for his passing. Hu Yuzhi – ‘a little homunculus of a man with bright eyes like a marmoset’, wrote Victor Purcell – returned to Singapore to work with Tan Kah Kee to build unity among the local Chinese.26 He edited the most prominent literary magazine, Feng Hsia (Land Below the Wind), which ran to 132 issues between December 1945 and June 1948, and achieved an unprecedented quality of output. Hu Yuzhi’s wife, Shen Zijiu, published Malaya’s first journal for women, New Woman, and many newspapers now began to carry literary supplements. Hu Yuzhi became a vocal critic of the Malayan Communist Party’s propaganda: he felt it lacked power and depth. The people were in a state of ‘semifeudal towkay-ism’. Bosses controlled the newspapers, would-be intellectuals such as students became clerks and were ‘shoved into a shop’; teachers became ‘mere wage-earners’.27‘We do not require tanks, guns and hand-grenades now,’ wrote Hu Yuzhi. ‘Our weapons are pen and paper only.’ The struggle was against a ‘servile culture’. The problem was ‘thinking too highly of foreigners and belittling ourselves. This is a common psychological phenomenon among the Malayan people. It needs to be conquered, because it makes it easy for the rule of imperialism.’28 This touched upon a nagging difficulty for the Malayan Communist Party. After its losses to the Japanese in the war, it lacked experienced and educated leaders; Chin Peng’s schooling had ended when he was fifteen years of age, and in this he was not exceptional. To broaden its support, the leftist movement began to cultivate the intelligentsia.
The war made anti-imperialists out of British rule’s natural supporters, the very middle-class ‘Malayans’ the British hoped to cultivate. For them a defining issue was ‘back pay’ for civil servants. After the liberation, the Europeans in Changi and Sime Road were quietly paid the thousands of dollars in salary they had accrued over three and a half years; they were given 90 per cent of it in cash before being repatriated, and even a generous clothing allowance to replace their wardrobes. This ‘internment bounty’ incensed Asian civil servants, who, although they had not been incarcerated, had been singled out for pay cuts and persecution by the Kempeitai. For them, ‘Singapore was one large prison camp’. For the first time, the middle classes marched in protest. They were eventually made a raised offer of three and a half months’ pay, but the damage was done.29 As one former student at Singapore’s elite Raffles College observed: ‘My education in the unfairness and absurdities of human existence was completed by what I saw in the immediate aftermath of the war. If three and a half years of Japanese occupation had earned me my degree in the realities of life, the first year in liberated Singapore was my postgraduate course.’ The young Lee Kuan Yew would soon sail for England to complete his formal education at Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge. He would return to dominate the island’s politics for over fifty years. The attitude of his generation of colonial students would be dramatically different from an earlier elite generation who had returned, in Lee’s words, ‘overawed and overwhelmed by English values’.30
The ‘English-speaking brain-workers’, as they termed themselves, now began to organize, and a circle of them established Singapore’s first political party, the Malayan Democratic Union, in December 1945. The MDU included some of the most privileged young Malayans. Its first secretary, Lim Hong Bee, was educated at Cambridge on a King’s Scholarship, together with another member of the party, Lim Kean Chye, a son of one of the oldest and most illustrious Straits Chinese families of Penang. An older London-trained lawyer, the Guyana-born Eurasian Chinese Philip Hoalim, was chairman, and his money seemed to keep the small party afloat. The Malayan Democratic Union set up an office above the Liberty Cabaret in New Bridge Road, and the dance floor became a setting for political debate.31 The intellectuals’ vision of ‘Malaya’ was formed out of the cosmopolitan urban world of Singapore. It was inclusive and internationalist. Its manifesto announced that the MDU did ‘not take the stand that Malaya should break away from Great Britain. Indeed, Malaya with full democratic self-government will benefit most if she remains within the British Commonweath…’32 This was, by the standards of the time, a very moderate platform. But it attracted little sympathy from the British. Many of the Union’s leaders, including its most well-known figure, the lawyer John Eber, came from the Eurasian community, and they were subjected to condescending racial prejudice. Eber’s anti-colonialism, it was muttered, was grounded in resentment that while his English mother could mix with the colonial elite, his Eurasian father could not. But Eber had been largely brought up by his mother’s relatives in England, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and on returning to Singapore had joined the exclusive Tanglin Club and Singapore Golf Club. As his friend and fellow Cambridge graduate Lim Hong Bee put it, he was ‘in no way seen to display any of the obsessional traits of inferiority… He h
ad no need to.’ The British reaction to him was pathological and hostile, Lim suggested, because Eber was ‘an acute embarrassment – so much like them in form, yet so different in substance’.33
The leaders of the Malayan Democratic Union were inspired by a socialist critique of imperialism. They argued that the British had created communal tensions in Malaya by building up the non-Malays as middlemen, and they looked to overcome this by a programme of nationalization and rural development. A central concern was to develop a system of ‘social security’ on the New Zealand model. In education, they looked beyond their own anglophone bias to the creation of four national language streams; the Malayan Democratic Union’s newspaper, The Democrat, gave unprecedented coverage to Malay affairs and to the Malay Nationalist Party. Again, and as Victor Purcell later admitted, this was no more dangerous than the socialism of Sutan Sjahrir or Aung San, but the party’s relations with the British were distorted entirely by its relationship with the MCP. The Malayan Democratic Union was never an organized political party as such; most of its 300 ‘members’ were civil servants and its leaders were acutely aware of their need to reach out to the masses, but also of the obstacles to them doing so. They shared the Liberty Cabaret with a consumers’ co-operative society, which was an important means of local self-help during the economic crisis. Eber built up his political reputation by working for them and for trade unions as a legal adviser. He was active in the back-pay issue and, as a senior local lawyer, was prepared to be co-opted to government committees. But Eber and the other leaders saw co-operation with the communists as their route to the masses. The MCP’s open leader in Singapore, Wu Tian Wang, attended the inauguration of the MDU on 19 January 1946, the same ceremony at which a Friends of Indonesia Association was founded. The MDU’s organizing secretary, Gerald de Cruz, was a Party member, and Lim Hong Bee, who returned to the United Kingdom at the end of the year, would act as its unofficial roving representative overseas. One of the MDU’s most gifted figures was Eu Chooi Yip, a bilingual writer whom Hu Yuzhi singled out for praise ‘as a scholar and as a writer of the modern school’. He had worked for the Chinese Protectorate and as a government inspector of mines and possessed a formidable knowledge of the labour scene. The sympathies of young intellectuals such as Eu Chooi Yip for the MCP would very soon place them in an acute dilemma, and the British would exploit this to ‘expose’ the Malayan Democratic Union as a communist Trojan horse. But the MDU was a diverse and independent organization, and the Malayan Spring was a moment before such difficult and irreversible ideological choices had to be made. The question of who was and who was not a communist was of interest only to the Malayan Security Service. But police paranoia about what they rather sinisterly termed the ESI – English-speaking intelligentsia – was already beginning to dominate and distort British attempts to build a ‘Malayan’ nationalism.