by Harper, Tim
10
1948: The Malayan Revolution
Shortly after Burma’s leaders received their independence, at King’s House in Kuala Lumpur there was imperial pageantry of a very different kind. On 21 January 1948, the nine rulers of the Malay States, each resplendent with kris and hereditary regalia and flanked by their ministers, signed a treaty with the British government. These agreements superseded the Malayan Union, whose inauguration they had boycotted so dramatically two years previously, and brought into being the Federation of Malaya. The Anglo-Malay condominium that had ruled Malaya for over half a century before 1941 was now restored. But the ceremony was carefully stage-managed. Up until the final hour on the previous day, just as the treaties were sent to the printer, the leader of UMNO, Dato Onn bin Jaafar, continued to insist on prerogatives for the Malay States. He had not forgiven the British for abandoning the Malays two years previously. His master, the Sultan of Johore, was the only ruler to be absent; he pleaded his gout and sent his son on his behalf. Such was the degree of mistrust that the governor, Sir Edward Gent, sent a government doctor to verify this. But, on the day, the fifty necessary signatures were secured. ‘The whole show’, Gent reported to the Colonial Office, ‘was accompanied by a Hollywood atmosphere of brilliant white lights and movie cameras.’ This raised the temperature to ‘about 150 degrees’. The ceremony dragged on most of the afternoon, much to the ire of the Sultan of Perak, who had a horse running in the 5.30 at the Selangor Turf Club.1 This too gave the sense of the old world coming back to life. The sport of kings, the Malaya Tribune observed, was now ‘Malaya’s second industry’. An estimated $1.5m was wagered at the Singapore Turf Club’s revival meeting at the end of 1947.2
Around such observances, the elites of Malaya began to close ranks. The previous October the wealthy towkays in the Chinese Chambers of Commerce had opposed the new constitution and supported a mass hartal. Gent was afraid that, with Malay feelings running so high, any further protests when the Federation came into effect on 1 February might result in racial war. He armed himself with a bill to outlaw hartals: it was, in effect, a ‘shoot to kill’ ordinance. There were plans afoot to arrest the leaders of the protest movement, including the head of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Malaya’s ‘rubber and pineapple king’, Lee Kong Chian. But the Governor General, Malcolm MacDonald, thought this a ‘serious political mistake’.3 He drew on all his diplomatic skills to talk the towkays round. In private, both Lee Kong Chian and Tan Cheng Lock, the hartal’s figurehead, now baulked at the many-headed hydra of popular protest. They feared that any breakdown in Sino-Malay relations might prove irretrievable. They had gone as far as they would go. As a compromise, they agreed to supply placemen to serve on the new Federal Legislative Council; one of them was Tan Cheng Lock’s son, Tan Siew Sin.4 The broadest-based political movement in Malaya’s history had dissolved. The left was deeply disillusioned. On 1 February, as Gent was sworn in as the first High Commissioner of the Federation of Malaya at Kuala Lumpur, within earshot of the artillery salute, the Malayan Communist Party met in secret to discuss the possibility of armed revolt.
The Federation left the Malay rulers sovereign and the States’ elite entrenched in federal bureaucracies. Their powers over land and appointments were considerable: British advisers to the Malay courts complained that government files were withheld from them.5 This was less a step to self-government than a return to the time-honoured tug-of-war of indirect rule. But Britain at least controlled a strengthened central government. As the voice of middle-class Asian opinion, the Malaya Tribune, put it, the Federation was a ‘gentlemen’s agreement under which the Malays are granted certain privileges on the understanding that they will leave all real authority in the hands of British bureaucracy’.6 British Southeast Asia seemed extraordinarily resilient, and it was more valuable to Britain than ever before. In 1938 Malaya had accounted for 2.57 per cent of Britain’s world trade; by 1951, this would rise to 9.9 per cent and the figure for Southeast Asia as a whole would be 11.36 per cent. Malaya remained the world’s top producer of rubber, which brought $120m into the sterling area in 1948; the nearest commodity in value was cocoa at $50m. In 1948 the sterling area suffered an overall dollar deficit of $1,800m, but Malaya’s surplus was $170m. Its nearest competitors were the Gold Coast, with a surplus of $47.5 m, Gambia ($24.5 m) and Ceylon ($23m). But, at the end of the year, Ceylon’s contribution was lost. By 1952 – 3 Malaya was providing 35.26 per cent of Britain’s net balance of payments with the dollar area.7 The first British settlements in the region were founded in the wake of the fall of the first British empire of the Atlantic. Now a third British empire seemed to be emerging out of the loss of India and Burma. Soothsaying for his masters in Whitehall, W. Linehan, a senior scholar-administrator in the Malayan Civil Service, concluded that the prospect of the rise of a strong independence movement in Malaya ‘within the next generation or so, appears exceedingly remote’.8
At the epicentre of British Southeast Asia was the new Commissioner General, Malcolm MacDonald, with his bustling court of political, economic, military and financial advisers at Phoenix Park in Singapore. He was, in the words of one Singapore civil servant, ‘an influence that was pervasive yet without power’.9 MacDonald acted as the political impresario of British imperialism in the region. He remained convinced that Britain could mould local political development after its own image. In early 1948 this seemed to be moving at a quicker pace in Singapore than in Malaya, with elections for seats on its Legislative Council due on 20 March. The island had been excluded from the Federation; it was, in theory at least, ready to join as soon as Malay political opinion would allow it to. MacDonald encouraged its leading citizens to organize themselves into a loyalist party. The Singapore Progressive Party was founded in August 1947 by John Laycock, a Yorkshire-born lawyer married to a Chinese, who recruited the respected Straits Chinese C. C. Tan, with whom he played golf. Another early member was John Ede, a Wykehamist who had taught at the school of princes, Ajmer College in India, but as Swaraj approached had taken up an offer from his old Cambridge friend, the Singapore magnate Loke Wan Tho, to run his Cathay Cinema. Ede met Laycock at the Singapore Island golf club and later married his daughter. Laycock had an orchid garden on the north of the island, and the flower became the Progressive Party’s emblem. It was a genteel movement of ‘people who knew people’: the voice of the ‘domiciled’ of Singapore, or ‘people who regard this country as their home’.10 This was the political language of the old Straits Settlements, which the Progressive Party sought to revive. Only in 1955 did it commit itself to a date for independence: 1963. This was to prove uncannily accurate, but it was entirely out of kilter with the radical mood of the time. Nevertheless, the Progressive Party was a liberal political alternative where few existed, and it won five seats in the polls. The MCP and the Malayan Democratic Union did not contest their first electoral opportunity. They scorned the unrepresentative franchise, which was restricted to British subjects, of whom only 22,395 registered, 45 per cent of them Indians.11 In retrospect, the senior figure in the Malayan Democratic Union, Philip Hoalim, felt that to stand aside was a mistake: it played into the hands of those who refused to believe in their commitment to democratic methods. They would not be given a second opportunity.
Singapore’s old money seemed to be well-entrenched once again. Many leading professionals and businessmen fought shy of party politics. Loke Wan Tho – according to his sister, ‘more suited to be a university professor than a business man’ – was a sponsor of the Progressive Party, but preferred to exercise influence behind the scenes. Loke’s father was a pioneer tin-miner and first citizen of Kuala Lumpur who had given the British government £1.5m in war loans in 1914. His sister was married to a senior colonial servant, and Loke himself was a good friend of the Commissioner General – they shared a passion for photography and ornithology (MacDonald had been known to commandeer a local fire tender to watch birds in the jungle canopy) – and co-authored a
book on Angkor Wat.12 The newer, China-born elite also aspired to new heights of influence. Lee Kong Chian was one of the first towkays to be fluent in English. He travelled extensively in the West and his business adopted modern management methods; he commanded enough clout to receive a personal audience from the governor of the Bank of England. Lee was son-in-law to Tan Kah Kee and also wielded influence in traditional Chinese clan associations. He had been active in the National Salvation movement and spent the war in the United States, where he lectured officers at Columbia University on China and raised money for its relief. His philanthropy was felt in education and other causes in both Singapore and China.13 Like many of his kind, Lee Kong Chian moved comfortably between different worlds. But during the next two years the Chinese of Singapore and Malaya – like the Indians the previous year – would be confronted with an acute dilemma as to where to locate their political allegiances.
The big men of the community could not avoid being drawn into the maelstrom of civil war in China between the Kuomintang and the communists. Tan Kah Kee, now seventy three, made a final attempt to rally the Overseas Chinese behind a ‘third force’, the China Democratic League. But he was no longer the unifying figure he had been in the fight against Japan. Tan had become deeply pessimistic about Chiang Kai Shek’s ability to return democracy to the people: it was, he said, like negotiating with a tiger for its hide. He became ever more candid in his conviction that only Mao’s communists possessed the drive and moral authority to govern China, and this led him into a controversial alliance with the Malayan Communist Party. His speeches lambasted the United States for its support of Chiang. This alarmed the British and divided the Malayan Chinese. When, in May 1948, Chiang Kai Shek was elected president of China by the National Assembly, Tan Kah Kee and his supporters refused to accept the election’s legitimacy and launched an anti-Chiang Kai Shek propaganda drive. The Chinese schools, which were now reopened and expanding dramatically, became a key battleground for the hearts and minds of the Chinese; powerful patrons and fiercely partisan teachers competed to politicize the students.14 This opened a new front in the struggle between right and left in Malaya.
In the last months of the Nationalist regime in China, the Kuomintang experienced a remarkable resurgence in Malaya. Many towkays saw it as a route to influence. The office of the Kuomintang Overseas Department in Singapore was the centre of a region-wide web of intelligence gathering and fund raising for China. The vice-minister of overseas affairs, Tai Kwee Sheng, used monies allocated for the relief of the Overseas Chinese in Burma to finance anti-left newspapers in Malaya. The British were amazed at sums moving hither and thither and worried about the haemorrhaging of foreign exchange.15 The Kuomintang was now attracting younger, Malaya-born, bilingual leaders; up-and-coming industrialists such as Ng Tiong Kiat in Selangor with his rubber and oil plantations and saw mills. It had become a class-based organization that transcended clan and dialect groups, and its supporters captured control of centres of Chinese social life on the peninsula such as the Chinese Assembly Hall in Kuala Lumpur and the Chinese Chambers of Commerce. Only the Singapore chamber remained aligned to Lee Kong Chian and Tan Kah Kee. As the Kuomintang vied for influence with the Malayan Communist Party, it had the advantage of being able to be more open in its organization. It had, at its peak, 219 branches and 27,690 members, excluding its Youth Corps, and mounted a direct challenge to communist domination of the trade unions.16 In the first months of 1948, a struggle for control of the community was underway. Malaya’s Cold War was growing in intensity.
A THIRD WORLD WAR?
From late 1947 the British became aware of rumours sweeping the towns and villages of Malaya that a third world war was about to begin. In some places, the Second World War had not ended. In the borderlands of north Perak there were some disquieting goings-on. The area was home to a large concentration of Chinese tobacco and ginger farmers who also had a reputation for smuggling and casual violence. ‘It is clear’, came reports, ‘that these Kwongsi Chinese are no ordinary bandits, and that a very strange state of affairs exists astride the northern extremity of Malaya along the general lines of River Perak from Kroh through Kuala Kangsar in a SW direction.’17 On 9 April a British police officer ventured up there with a Chinese guide to investigate. The guide shot him dead. A full-scale military operation was launched; the first occasion on which the army was called to aid the civil power. The troops went into the forest at the 74th milestone on the northern road to Grik, a frontier town close to the Thai border. After about fifty minutes’ trekking through dense undergrowth they stumbled upon a sentry post. Then Chinese appeared in uniform, their leader kitted out in Japanese surplus, and fired on them with automatic guns until a bugle sounded a retreat. The British troops then charged into an empty camp. There was a kitchen, with stocks of pork and Ryvita, a barrack room and other buildings. It had held up to thirty men, and on the captured muster rolls there was even a Sikh and three or four Japanese names. In a nearby clearing they found a military training school, newly constructed, complete with desks, a blackboard and wall-portraits of Chiang Kai Shek and Sun Yat Sen. It was built to accommodate 200 to 300 men. In raids in the nearby town of Lenggong, the police pulled in one Yuin See, a Kuomintang leader with the rank of major in the Chinese army. He was, he confessed under interrogation, a member of the Malayan Overseas Chinese Self-defence Army. But, he took pains to emphasize, it was not an anti-British army. They were preparing for a new world war, which would be a battle between the communists and the rest of the world. The force, it emerged, had 800 to 1,000 members and controlled an area of some 600 square miles, where it had set up a civil administration with its own taxation and courts.18 As Major Yuin See explained: ‘The British made mistakes in 1941 when they were caught unprepared and it appears that the same thing is going to be repeated, but the Chinese cannot afford to suffer as they have suffered in 1941 and also in the period of confusion at the time of the Japanese surrender when great numbers of Chinese were massacred by the Malays.’19
Two years after the reoccupation, large tracts of the peninsula remained badlands which the British left largely ungoverned: tracts of jungle in which foresters feared to tread; isolated corners of rubber estates, which planters left to locals to tap for themselves. Johore – where the first British planter had been killed in August of the previous year – was particularly notorious for gang robbery, as was the Kedah border with Thailand. In the estuaries and stilted fishing villages of Perak, smuggling and piracy still thrived on a large scale, and individual gang bosses exercised an extraordinary sway. On the north Perak coast in 1947 and 1948 a young man known as ‘The Leper’ had a gang some fifty strong and operated three fast motor launches – former air-force rescue craft – out of the mangroves where the police could not reach him. His men – ‘hunting hawks and dogs’ according to one witness – raked in large sums through robbery, extortion and taxation of opium dens. One of them, ‘The Crocodile’, amassed tribute as the unofficial harbourmaster of the town of Matang. ‘The Leper’ had been a member of the Ang Bin Hoay brotherhood in Penang, but had broken away from it and set up on his own. For this reason he was seen as a homicidal upstart by the local population, and he died when a whole village at Bagan Si-Api-Api in Sumatra, where he had founded a pirate kingdom, turned on him and slaughtered him and thirty of his gang.
Even in the more settled areas, the triads amounted to a form of shadow government. On the southern outskirts of Kuala Lumpur the power of the 100-strong Green Mountain Gang was notorious, and on the adjacent coast, based on the off-shore Chinese fishing village of Pulau Ketam, the Sea Gang had around 11,000 affiliates and almost a complete grip on the docks and coastal trade of Port Swettenham. Ostensibly some of these societies had a social function: they were places where shopkeepers, traders and contractors met to drink or gamble. But some were involved in the opium and lottery business, and all of them offered protection to their members. When the Ang Bin Hoay brotherhood established itself in Kuala Lu
mpur, stall-holders, shopkeepers, brothel keepers, even travelling theatre companies all paid it protection money. Another similar brotherhood, known as Wah Kei, was increasingly influential among the large Cantonese population of the capital. On 23 March the two societies fought through the night in the Lucky World amusement park over control of the protection rackets. They paid off the police as a matter of form; many Cantonese detectives were members of Wah Kei, and there was nothing their European officers could do about it.20