by Harper, Tim
The Malayan Democratic Union was to assume an importance far beyond its numbers, and would later be seen as an historic lost opportunity of Malayan politics. It arose at a moment when a broad-based multiracial patriotism seemed to be within reach; an authentic Malayan nationalism that might absorb the various aliran of the time. It was evidenced in popular culture and drew on the unstructured and flexible networks of the informal economy. Local papers now stressed the close cultural and economic connections between the Chinese and Malay communities. Through shared campaigns for the protection of journalists from harassment and for freedom of speech, a stronger sense of the ‘left’ was emerging, and in Malay the equivalent word, kiri, was increasingly used. It was a time when neither English-speaking intellectuals nor the MCP believed they could work alone and when both hoped to widen the scope of colonial reforms. The MCP seized the moment to launch a Malayan United Democratic Front. On 21 January, the anniversary of Lenin’s death, the Party held its first plenary meeting since 1941. At it, Lai Teck vigorously defended his position and on a surge of support was re-elected general secretary. In his speech, he reviewed the history of the Party, and its present position. ‘The colonial problem’, Lai Teck argued, ‘can be resolved only in [one of] two ways: liberation through a bloody revolutionary struggle (as in the case of Vietnam and Indonesia) or through the strength of united front’. He argued that both the internal conditions – the need to win support outside the Chinese community and the promise of colonial reform – and the external situation – particularly events in India and Burma – made this a time to wait and to watch, and to take the opportunity to expand the Party’s mass support.34‘Only through racial unity [could] the colonial conditions in Malaya be wound up…’; only through this could the Party ‘discharge the sacred mission entrusted upon them by history’. Lai Teck did not even mention independence as an immediate objective. Yet the policy commanded wide support and would be the foundation of the Party’s strategy for the next two years. The stated aim was the ‘hundredfold strengthening of the unity of the three races and the coalition of various parties and factions’.35
But the Malayan Communist Party and the BMA headed for confrontation. Just prior to the plenary conference Chin Peng and seven other comrades – including Colonel Itu and Liew Yao – were invited to a special ceremony in Singapore to receive their campaign medals, the Burma Star and the 1939/45 Star, from the supremo. They acknowledged Mountbatten with a clenched-fist salute. Lai Teck was still lying low. The MPAJA men were accommodated in the luxury of Raffles Hotel. At a gala cocktail party at Government House, Mountbatten greeted them with some words in Mandarin he had memorized for the occasion, Chin Peng chatted with General Messervy and Lee Kiu charmed Victor Purcell by her fascination with the royal portraits: ‘With a different hair-do’, he announced in his journal, ‘I believe she could give Miss Eng Ming Chin a run for her money.’36 The next day they were to be given a VIP tour of the Royal Navy and RAF bases and the Alexandra barracks. Unwilling to be used in this way, the MPAJA leaders, after an all-night discussion, refused to attend in protest at the continued imprisonment of the Selangor guerrilla leader Soong Kwong. The British reaction was, in Chin Peng’s account, emotional. John Davis, his comrade from the jungle, arrived suddenly at the Party’s office in Kuala Lumpur with a prepared, typed apology and demanded that Chin Peng and his friends sign it. Lai Teck was in the room, but made no protest. The younger men duly signed the letter, which was never published. Ahmad Boestamam was also asked to sign series of similar pre-typed letters to the BMA to prevent his newspaper being closed down. On the face of it these were minor enough incidents, but powerful undercurrents of pride governed the relations between these young fighting men. The rookie officers of the BMA were troubled by the ignominy of 1942, and were acutely sensitive to criticism and perceived slights. The wounded izzat of the Raj collided with the determination of Asian leaders to maintain their honour and ‘face’ in the eyes of their people.
The episode looms large in Chin Peng’s account of the breakdown of the relationship between the MPAJA and the British, and of his growing frustration with the leadership of Lai Teck. But Lai Teck’s betrayals were closing in on him. In February a leader of the Partai Komunis Indonesia, Alimin, came to Kuala Lumpur with the leader of the Thai Communist Party, Li Chee Shin. Alimin was a legendary figure and a well-known Comintern agent, but was travelling under an assumed name. Lai Teck did not recognize Alimin, and was himself unknown to either communist visitor. His claim to be the Comintern’s man was weakened considerably.37 About this time, too, it seems that Lai Teck resumed his meetings with the British. It is not clear how frequent they were, or precisely what transpired at them. The few accounts by writers who have seen unreleased British records suggest that the allegations of Lai Teck’s treachery made by Ng Yeh Lu were discussed, as well as caches of arms hidden at the end of the war. Lai Teck seems to have enlarged on published Party pronouncements, and stressed that the MCP’s policy was one of peaceful pressure on the British than rather than violent confrontation.38 Although this may have reassured the British, it is not clear how else they benefited from their relationship with Lai Teck. He was increasingly compromised, and his natural life as an agent was drawing to a close.
Immediately after the plenary meeting, a general strike was called for 29 January. It was to mark the establishment of a pan-Malayan General Labour Union and its demands focused on the release of labour activists and ex-MPAJA men. By March 1946, 70 per cent of MPAJA veterans in Selangor were unemployed; thirty-three had either been convicted of or were being tried for various offences.39 The case of Soong Kwong now dominated public debate, in a way that Aung San’s did in Burma. His trial was a confrontation between the unbending logic of colonial law and the new demand for government by the popular will. It deepened local outrage that the British were not pursuing collaborators with the same energy as they were targeting their former allies. In the words of a poet:
Soong Kwong, Soong Kwong,
You have taken the wrong path.
Why didn’t you make a fortune out of the Japs,
Instead of taking up anti-Jap activities, in the tropics?
An old saying goes:
The Good and Loyal are always tortured.
The Evil and Bad are praised in temples.
Another old saying runs:
The cunning rabbits are dead,
The excellent fox remains.
You have taken the wrong path.40
Soong Kwong’s trial was riddled with inconsistencies: it was held in a military court under civil law; if military law had been used, Soong Kwong’s defenders argued, there would be no case to answer as their man was a belligerent. There were three separate trials; at the first, the British judge was overruled by the two Asian assessors and ordered a retrial; at the second, when the judge was again overruled, he ordered a third trial. On this occasion the Asian assessors were dispensed with altogether, and replaced by two British military judges, on the grounds that no Asian judge could withstand intimidation. Soong Kwong was found guilty and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. At the final hearing, he threw his slippers at the judge.
The general strike was Malaya’s first and the largest trial of strength yet between the left and the British regime. In the eyes of Philip Hoalim and other Malayan Democratic Union leaders who gave it their support, it was a strike for civil rights. A few days earlier the British had further provoked the Chinese community when British national servicemen wrecked the offices of Chinese associations and tore down pictures of Chiang Kai Shek. Local hawkers protested bitterly at one incident in Senai, Johore: ‘although we are merely hawkers who know nothing, our national flag represents our country. And they insulted our flag in such a manner!’41 The strike threatened to cripple the colonial economy. The first confrontations began on 21 January at the Singapore Harbour Board, where 7,000 stevedores again refused to load shipments of arms bound for Java. On 29 January between 150,000 and 170,000 wo
rkers downed tools in Singapore, another 60,000 in Selangor and more in Penang, Perak and elsewhere. In Singapore the markets came to a standstill and the British reported that 3,500 pickets and supporters were out on trishaws and lorries enforcing the stoppage. The Kuomintang and Chinese business leaders claimed that if the British could break the strike, they could get the city back to work within hours, but in the event the strike was abruptly called off at its peak, on the eve of Chinese New Year, just before support threatened to drop away. The General Labour Union claimed a major victory. Soong Kwong was released, his sentence remitted, on 4 February. Mountbatten had wanted to do this before the strike, but had been unwilling to be seen to capitulate to pressure. The effect was the same. In the words of the BMA’s police adviser, René Onraet: ‘never in the History of Singapore have all sections of the diverse Asiatic community been so overawed and subdued’.42 The ‘January 29 Strife’, as it became known in Communist Party annals, was a political strike, and the British justified their punitive reaction to it on these grounds. But in private they acknowledged that they were fighting unrest based on hunger. ‘The administration cannot have a clear conscience in fighting a general strike on such as basis’, warned the chief civil affairs officer in Singapore. ‘The next strike might be effective… If force were to be used, it would be disastrous for here and for the empire as a whole.’43
Despite such warnings, British opinion hardened. Mountbatten observed in his diary that officials were now calling for ‘more flogging’ and the death penalty.44 Even the architects of the liberal policy wavered. As Richard Broome, who with Force 136 had spent many months in the jungle with Chin Peng, told Mountbatten: ‘they are after revolution for the sake of revolution… The great majority of the leaders are after nothing else but trouble, and gratification of the lust for power that the stirring up of trouble gives them. They are therefore an evil force…’ A series of monster demonstrations was now planned in support of human rights. But the timing of them provoked the British beyond all endurance. The unions demanded a public holiday on 15 February, the fourth anniversary of the fall of Singapore, and asked to hold a mass rally at Happy World to mark National Humiliation Day. Enraged, Mountbatten suggested an alternative public holiday on 27 February to commemorate the sook ching massacres of Chinese.45 BMA officers pressed Mountbatten to revive pre-war mechanisms for control of associations and speech, and suggested that powers of banishment be used against the organizers. At this point, the supremo hesitated. He objected to the idea of ‘banishment’; always quick with an historical analogy, he pointed out that the banishment of Mussolini’s opponents to Lipari had kept the flame of anti-fascism active. Lenin himself had been banished by the tsar of Russia, and this had increased his prestige. And where would people be banished to, Mountbatten asked? Most were of long domicile in Malaya, and would qualify for the new Malayan Union citizenship. Should the new state choose its citizens on criteria of ‘desirability’? In the end, at Purcell’s own suggestion, Mountbatten was persuaded to use old legislation that allowed him to ‘expel aliens’; a much less loaded term. Mountbatten took the unusual step of despatching his trade-union adviser, John Brazier, to London to explain personally to Labour ministers that the General Labour Unions were not ‘legitimate’ trade unions and were out ‘to embarrass us by every means and… hoping to arouse contempt for the administration’.46 At 4 p.m. on 13 February a warning was issued that anyone who attempted to organize strikes ‘to interfere with the due course of law’ may be ‘repatriated to the country of their origin or their citizenship’. On the following evening Purcell and Broome were present at a series of pre-emptive arrests on the premises of the General Labour Union and other bodies. On 15 February the monster meeting in Singapore did not materialize, but there was a gathering outside St Joseph’s Institution, in the heart of the city. Police and troops went in with lathis and were seen by journalists to beat men lying on the ground. Two of them died and their bodies were paraded by demonstrators through the streets. Over 5,000 people attended the funeral of 18-yearold student Lin Feng Chow at the Khek Cemetery in Bukit Timah. Upcountry, the repression was more severe: in Labis, Johore, fifteen people were killed and forty-eight wounded when troops opened fire on a crowd. At Mersing, where the protests were against the original killings, another seven people were killed and twenty-six wounded.47
The ‘February 15th Incident’ marked the end of the Malayan Spring. There was public outrage at the deaths, which were reported in the British and international press. But the arrests continued. The British now had in custody many senior union leaders, including the chairman and vice-chairman of the Singapore General Labour Union, and the secretary of the MCP in Singapore, Lim Ah Liang. The British baulked at deporting Lim Ah Liang: he was jailed for four years. But Mount-batten sought permission from the Chinese government to deport ten of them. The reply came back that ‘suitable arrangements’ would be made for their reception. This stopped Mountbatten in his tracks. He was now worried that they might be ‘bumped off’ on arrival; he had heard that, fearing this, many convicted communists before the war had begged for life imprisonment rather than banishment. Purcell responded that this had not been known to happen since 1929. In that year, 850 people had been banished. Nor was the Colonial Office moved. But the supremo, now in Australia, where he failed to persuade Australian trade unionists to call off their blockade of goods for Indonesia, refused to endorse the deportations. ‘I am not thinking of my own name, or even of the good name of the military administration, I am solely imbued with the desire to act in a manner which I consider in the true interests of HMG, and which history in ten years’ time will vindicate.’48 The civil government, due to take over at the end of March, must deal with the issue. The problem was, as the growing number of hardliners – now including Purcell and Hone – well realized, that although civil government could reintroduce banishment it would also have to reintroduce habeas corpus. ‘It is’, Mountbatten concluded, ‘precisely because the civil government is unable to detain these people legally that I am being asked to take action.’49 The general feeling of the British in Malaya was that Mount-batten was determined ‘not to let himself in for any unpleasant political consequences’.50 He wished to be remembered as a liberator. ‘I do not really think he believed that the Chinese communists were really communists,’ Hone reflected later. ‘He thought that they were just decent left-wing chaps who valued freedom of speech and freedom of association as much as we did and that if they were properly handled by the administration generally, they were 100% British.’51 On the first day of civilian rule, Hone reported, in one of its first acts, the new government ‘despatched ten little nigger boys homeward’.52
Victor Purcell was also about to depart. His own progress had been extraordinary: from tribune of the liberal imperialism to one of the leading advocates of preventive detentions. A personal turning point, he recalled twenty years later, had been on 29 January when the servants in the residence he and Ralph Hone shared refused to serve them. It was clear then that ‘we must prevent them taking charge of the country or abdicate’. The illusions of liberal imperialism were exploded. Purcell was, like many British officials, unable to live with the consequences of his own policy. Democratic opinion that had emerged in the Malayan Spring appalled him, so too had the very idea of ‘the people’. ‘The ideal human being boils down to the moronic’, he wrote in one of the last of his journals, ‘the adenoidal, the unwashed, the scrofulous, the naked, the illiterate, the dumb and, above all, the passive and the victimised.’ This was not a ‘people’, Purcell seemed to say, on which a progressive colonial policy could be based: ‘until Malaya produces her own leaders and her own sense of civic responsibility (which sometimes seems a thousand miles away) we must continue to accept the responsibility of governing’.53 For Malayans, the Spring was a chance to explore the meaning of freedom, and most had rejected the freedom that was on offer from the British.
Apparently, the democracy demanded by the people in t
he past few months differs a great deal from the democratic system as specified by the British Army. Hence ‘democratic’ tragedies have occurred incessantly. Perhaps the BMA may accuse the people of abusing ‘freedom’ over the past few months, but they must reflect on that which they promised the people. How may the people use the freedom so as to conform to the government specifications? There is no definite statement, and so the random use of force is inevitable.54