by Harper, Tim
On the night of 6 October an estate manager in southwest Johore, Archie Nicholson, was driving home with his wife after a dinner with a planter on a neighbouring estate when he suddenly came up against a roadblock. He decided to accelerate through it, but lost control of his car and died as it skidded and rolled into a ditch. His wife was stripped of her jewellery and beaten by four armed men, but she survived. Nicholson had been resident in Malaya since the late 1920s and was a veteran of the Burma–Siam railway. The European community was badly shaken. ‘Physical fear’, declared The Planter, ‘is creating havoc amongst the inhabitants of Malaya once renowned for their complacency and general tranquillity’. The tragedy was one of many incidents of armed robbery at the time; but, in the minds of many planters, it was indistinguishable from the confrontations they were experiencing with labour agitators on their estates. After Nicholson’s funeral, a delegation of planters descended on King’s House for a tense audience with Gent, at which they called for the introduction of emergency measures: the death penalty, banishment, ‘and particularly of flogging’. Kuala Lumpur, they said, was ignorant of the scale of the problem; only planters could take the pulse of the ulu, the upcountry. They demanded arms to defend themselves.45 Gent had come to represent all that many planters detested about the post-war empire: effete officials, income tax and socialism. Whilst it remained an unwritten rule in the European clubs (in the words of Anthony Burgess) that ‘the hairy legs and shorts of the visiting planter should not be juxtaposed to the pressed linen slacks of the government man’, many policemen and civil servants were equally disenchanted.46 But Gent felt a personal obligation to uphold the Labour government’s policy of encouraging trade unions and refused to capitulate in the face of pressure from employers. He dismissed them as ‘alarmist’. A story did the rounds that Gent began one interview with European businessmen with the words, ‘Before you tell me your troubles I want to hear what you have been doing lately to improve conditions for your workmen.’47 Old Malaya hands in London lobbied for his immediate recall. The crisis was a full dress rehearsal for what would later come to pass.
But in 1947, the principles of liberal imperialism prevailed. In private, Gent and the Governor General, Malcolm MacDonald, like Mountbatten before them, were fighting a holding action against colleagues who were urging resort to arbitrary powers. At the height of the strikes in Singapore, the governor, Sir Franklin Gimson, demanded more authority to banish people. Without it, he warned London, ‘the prestige of the government would be so damaged that it might be unable to control the situation’.48 The pre-war legislation that regulated trade unions and societies was now revived. But throughout 1947 the legal status of the Federations of Trade Unions remained in limbo. So did that of the Malayan Communist Party. On 26 June 1947 MacDonald convened a top-secret meeting in Singapore to consider banning it. It was, perhaps, the first sally of the Cold War in British Southeast Asia. Communism, MacDonald declared, was ‘Enemy No. 1’. The nearest Russians, he conceded, were in Bangkok, but their allies were at work in Malaya and Singapore among the ‘gullible’ Asiatic masses. They were a potential fifth column in time of war, and ‘a very strong and coherent policy’ was needed to counteract them. The military chiefs demanded to know why communists were still at large: ‘Why was their activity not regarded as an act of sedition against the King?’ The wartime agreement in the jungle between Force 136 and the MPAJA was now forgotten. In late 1946 Gent could find no record of the treaty in Kuala Lumpur; Whitehall doubted if it ever existed.49
MacDonald, in urging restraint, appealed to first principles. There were, he said, two types of communist. One was ‘the sincere idealist… He wanted to get the British out but was in some cases a lofty-minded Communist just as there were lofty-minded Conservatives, Labourites and Liberals, and it was always part of British democratic practice that this sort of man should be given complete freedom to express his views.’ Then there were the ‘conspirators whose activities were always such that steps had to be taken to bring action against them’. But, MacDonald concluded, ‘unless the Communist Party as a whole could be proved to be engaged in conspiracy it would be very hard to put it across to the authorities at home, who were the ultimate arbiters’.50 He won the day, and the MCP was temporarily reprieved. But the instruments for its destruction were already in place.
THE STRANGE DISAPPEARANCEOF MR WRIGHT
In March 1947 the Malayan Communist Party demonstrated that it could bring the colonial economy to a standstill. Whilst its senior cadres remained underground, its satellites flourished.51 Its heroic wartime struggle still exercised a tremendous hold over the imagination of the young. The MCP – itself an elite vanguard – had now around 11,800 mostly Chinese members. But it was also broadening its influence among other communities: there were 760 Indian and 40 Malay full members. Yet, at this point, the revolution suddenly seemed to stall. The strike wave petered out. In Singapore, the unions were, in a sense, victims of their own success: many of the key battles had already been won. But, equally, the conditions that had so favoured them since late 1945 – a labour shortage, weak employers – were now shifting against them. In mid-1947 there was a fall in the rubber price, and estate labourers faced cuts in wages. The employers now combined and initially refused to treat with the unions.52 A general strike was called but, although solid in some pockets, it was not a success. On the question of wages, the interests of Chinese and Indian workers began to diverge, and the vision of a united workers’ front was receding.53 Nor was it clear that the united front with the English-educated radicals of the Malayan Democratic Union was paying dividends. Many rank-and-file members, particularly ex-guerrillas, were frustrated that the party seemed to take a back seat in the popular struggle. One Chinese writer has described the old comrades of Titi, a rural community in Negri Sembilan: ‘They continued to enjoy the ecstasy of believing they were “guerrilla fighters” whilst enjoying the comforts of ordinary life at home. They still went on short camping trips, sang rousing songs, and shouted communist slogans. They assisted each other in times of difficulty.’54 Above all, they wanted their role to be acknowledged and for the MCP to claim leadership of the workers’ movement. As a letter from the Central Committee to the Penang party acknowledged, the lack of an open organization meant loss of control, and loss of control was liable to manifest itself in violence and unpopular strong-arm methods.55
The underground leadership of the MCP remained cloaked in secrecy, and this bred suspicion and intrigue. Rumours still circled around the Secretary General, ‘Mr Wright’. In late 1946, perhaps to buy himself some time, Lai Teck travelled to Hong Kong and Shanghai on a false Chinese passport obtained for him by his deputy, Chin Peng. He returned with words of advice from the Chinese Communist Party and used them to bolster support for the united-front strategy. But Lai Teck no longer had the monopoly on contacts with international communism. In January 1947 Wu Tian Wang, Rashid Maidin and the Perak trade unionist R. G. Balan left for London as delegates for the Empire Communist Conference: it was the first time these younger leaders had been in direct contact with other movements. Wu Tian Wang presented a history of the MCP’s struggle but, from the response, it was clear that its moderate aims, its calls for ‘self-government’, were a long way behind those of the communist parties of India, Ceylon and Burma. This news was disquieting. In Malaya, leaders read policy statements from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – particularly an appreciation by Lu Tingyi of Mao’s own views – that seemed to contradict Lai Teck’s assessment of international conditions. But still the mystique of the Secretary General endured. In mid 1946 Lai Teck effectively banished his most vocal critic, the Selangor leader Yeung Kuo, to his home state of Penang. That September Chin Peng travelled to the island to visit his wife and young daughter, who were spending time there with his mother-in-law. This marked the beginning of the unmasking of Lai Teck.
The only full account of the events that followed comes from the memoirs of Chin Peng himself, which were wr
itten with art and a great deal of hindsight, and from a long interview he gave to a panel of historians as he began to write them.56 Evidence from contemporary sources is very fragmentary. According to Chin Peng, he and his friend Yeung Kuo met on the beach at Tanjong Bungah – then as now a popular beauty spot – where they began to voice their suspicions of Lai Teck. It was dangerous talk, but it gave them confidence to raise the issue in an oblique way at a Central Committee meeting in Kuala Lumpur in February 1947, by questioning Lai Teck on the Party finances – as much as $2 million had passed through Lai Teck’s hands and was not formally accounted for – and on his ‘leadership style’. Confronted by Chin Peng, Lai Teck broke down, sobbing, ‘You have misunderstood me… you have misunderstood me.’ The older men present rallied round the leader. Lai Teck claimed he was ill, and spoke of taking a holiday. The meeting was then adjourned, on Lai Teck’s plea that he had urgent business in Singapore.57 But the stakes rose when some of the MPAJA’s major arms dumps in the jungle were discovered by the British. At one site near Kuala Lumpur, 213 weapons and over 16,000 rounds were lost.58 The Central Committee reconvened in Kuala Lumpur on 6 March, but Lai Teck did not appear. Chin Peng and another committee member drove to the small house in Setapak-Gombak that the Party had provided for Lai Teck to use on his visits to Kuala Lumpur. There he had a Chinese wife, a Party member who had earlier acted as a courier for him. They took her before the Central Committee. The Secretary General had eaten his breakfast, she said, and had left in his Morris Austin car for the meeting.59 Lai Teck was not seen in Malaya again.
At first it seemed likely that the Secretary General had been kidnapped by the British. Chin Peng maintained later that he thought otherwise, but held his tongue. Fearing liquidation as conspirators, Chin Peng and Yeung Kuo went to ground in a Chinese shophouse near the Malay quarter of Kampung Bahru, losing themselves in the coffeeshops and cinemas by day. But they did not seem to have been followed, and after a few days the pair re-emerged and, together with another leader who had been loyal to Lai Teck, were deputized to investigate the disappearance. Chin Peng followed his own line of enquiry: he travelled to Singapore, where witnesses were found among the Vietnamese émigrés. They had, it seemed, harboured suspicions of the man for a long time. When they had tried to acquire arms and men from Malaya, one of the young Vietnamese involved had recognized Lai Teck from his past life in southern Vietnam and had recalled his earlier disappearance. Then there were others who had seen him in close contact with the Japanese. These witnesses corroborated for the first time from a fresh source the stories that had been circulating since the beginning of the Japanese occupation. With this came information on Lai Teck’s many business dealings and on his women. There was a Vietnamese wife in a beachside bungalow in Katong and two mistresses – a Vietnamese and a Cantonese – who were maintained by Lai Teck in Singapore; the Vietnamese girl ran a bar in the Hill Street area.60 He had, it was later estimated, absconded with $130,000 in cash, 170 gold coins and 23 taels of gold.61 Two months after his departure, at a party plenum meeting in May, Lai Teck was exposed and expelled from the MCP as a Japanese spy. Chin Peng was elected Secretary General. He was still only twenty-three years old. Yeung Kuo became his deputy. Yeung Kuo broke the news of Lai Teck’s betrayals to his wife in Malaya, who was an old schoolfriend of his. She had just borne Lai Teck’s child, but according to Chin Peng, her response was resigned: ‘Then I suppose you must kill him.’ The house in Katong was staked out by the MCP, and secret contacts were called upon to discover if he was in Outram prison.62
Few members of the Party, outside its innermost circle, knew anything about these events. The Lai Teck personality cult remained strong; too strong for his followers to accept the news of his treachery without hard evidence. After all, the Party survived on ruthless, iron discipline. In July senior leaders were sent on Lai Teck’s trail. Chen Tian led a delegation to Prague to the World Federation of Democratic Youth Convention and, en route, visited Soviet officials in Paris to enquire if Lai Teck had escaped to Europe and to investigate his credentials as a Comintern representative. Chin Peng went to Hong Kong; it was the first time he had left the country. Using his cover as a businessman he travelled to Bangkok by train, arriving in early July. The city remained an important arms bazaar and haven for the Asian underground.63 He stayed at the Vietnamese delegation – an unofficial mission of the Viet Minh – and requested help from both the Vietnamese and Thai communists in tracking down Lai Teck. Chin Peng was there two weeks, but no progress was made. Shortly before he left he was taken by a Thai communist comrade to the Cathay Pacific airline office on Suriwong Road to collect his onward ticket to Hong Kong. As he later described it, on the way back by trishaw his eyes were scanning the oncoming traffic when suddenly his attention was caught by a man on the opposite side of the street: ‘He was standing with his back to us and seemingly in the middle of a transaction with a cigarette vendor. There was something about the body language. As we moved with the traffic I couldn’t take my eyes off the figure. We then came to a position where I was looking directly back at the man’s face. It was Lai Te[ck], all right. He was taking a first puff on a freshly lit cigarette. He raised his head and appeared to look in my direction.’ Chin Peng ducked back behind the canopy of his trishaw and told his Thai companion to order the driver to turn back. By the time they had done so, Lai Teck had boarded a motorized trishaw taxi – a tuk tuk – and they could not keep pace with him. Chin Peng returned to the office of the Vietnamese communists in Bangkok; they mobilized their armed underground, confident of finding any renegade in the city. Chin Peng left as planned for Hong Kong.64
The events that followed, as Chin Peng later recalled them, read as a ‘sort of fiction’. In Hong Kong Chin Peng reported to the CCP representatives on the disappearance and treachery of Lai Teck. They too, it seemed, had harboured suspicions about him, and found him evasive about his past. In his encounters with representatives of the CCP, Lai Teck had not dared to use the cover story he had employed in Malaya, that he was a Comintern agent. In Hong Kong, Chin Peng was asked to lie low whilst the CCP representatives consulted their superiors in Shanghai. He kicked his heels in a cheap hotel in Nathan Road, Kowloon, reading the Chinese and English newspapers, visiting the cinemas and travelling the Star Ferry to Hong Kong Island to kill time. It was on a return trip, scanning the advertisements and notices in the South China Morning Post, that he stumbled on a column of the previous day’s arrivals and departures. Arriving by Cathay Pacific from Bangkok was a C. H. Chang. This sounded like ‘Chang Hong’, an alias of Lai Teck, under which Chin Peng had obtained a fake passport for him. ‘He added a “C” in front of “H” so C.H. is Chang Hong and H. Chang is Hong Chang.’65 Chin Peng warned his CCP contact, a worker in the office of the Chinese business daily Hwa Sung. This was corroborated for the Chinese Communist Party by a former Kuala Lumpur Special Branch source then resident in Hong Kong. A few days later, with tremendous audacity, Lai Teck turned up at the same office to meet the CCP representatives. His story was a characteristic double bluff: he told them he had been kidnapped by the British, captured together with his car. He was first imprisoned, then banished to Thailand. He had come to Hong Kong, he said, to report this to the CCP. The CCP representatives demanded to know what his intentions were. To go back, he said, and he asked them for money and travel documents to return to Malaya, via Bangkok.66
This was reported to Chin Peng, but there was little he could do about it. The CCP’s position in Hong Kong was precarious: they would not sanction an assassination in British colonial territory. He gave Lai Teck a couple of days to get away, then followed him on a BOAC flight back to Bangkok. Once again, the Vietnamese underground began a search. After two days they discovered that Lai Teck was in a middle-range hotel. When the Vietnamese went to the address, they discovered that he had checked out. The next morning Chin Peng was told of this by a Vietnamese contact, and they concluded that he had ‘probably found some company’. But, once again, it wa
s Lai Teck who had calmly taken the initiative. He had contacted the Thai communists and had, in fact, left his hotel for a rendezvous with them. A few days later Chin Peng had to return to Penang. Before he left, he paid a courtesy call to Li Chee Shin, the leader of the Communist Party of Thailand. He asked about Lai Teck. Li responded quietly in Mandarin, ‘He’s no more.’ Li would give no further details, and none would emerge until a meeting in Peking in 1950, when MCP members met one of the Thai men who had been sent to meet Lai Teck, and heard the story of his demise. Three Thai heavies, young and inexperienced, had been sent to the rendezvous, where they kidnapped Lai Teck. Their orders were to bring him to interrogation, but Lai Teck, a small, frail man, began to shout, and there was a struggle: ‘They strangled him for a certain amount of time and suffocated him. He died on the spot. According to the Thai[s], they just put him in a gunny-sack, and then tossed him in the Menam River.’ Chin Peng returned to Malaya to be met with the news that he had been awarded the Order of the British Empire for his wartime services. His uncle took him to a Western restaurant in Ipoh to celebrate.67
The crisis was kept under wraps for most of 1947. The enquiry had taken a long time; only in December was a report finalized. It was filtered through the Party hierarchy so that the new leadership could gauge reactions carefully. It was the end of May 1948 before a statement by the Central Committee was published for the Party and the world at large. The document – ‘A written statement on L[ai] Teck’s case’ – correlates in its main themes, if not the details, with the account given by Chin Peng many years later: they are both, in a sense, authorized versions of the story. The ‘Lai Teck Document’ began with a short account of his rise to power in the Party in a time of ‘unprepared state of thought’ and of the steady loss of other leaders. ‘Following a well-calculated plan he posed as a sacrosanct “hero”’, it explained; ‘he had held up high the “International Signboard”’. But the document reveals little about his relationship with the British, saying only that ‘the possibility of his having conspired with the Imperialists was very great’. It emphasized instead his betrayals in wartime and his corruption. The document took particular pains to explain why his treachery had gone undiscovered for so long: ‘very few comrades’, it reported, ‘had any idea of his mode of living, for he was really a “mysterious person”’.