Forgotten Wars (22 page)

In the jungle, a book widely read by Communist Party leaders was Mao Zedong’s 1939 tract
On New Democracy
. It spoke of two stages of revolution: the first demanded a broad alliance across society before the second, full communist revolution, could be accomplished. It was a product of Mao’s need, in his base areas in the border regions in China, to consolidate his political control with policies that would appeal across a diverse social landscape. In Malaya the MCP had not seized the moment to create their Yenan, but, by analogy, New Democracy seemed well-tempered to Malaya’s plural society.
⁷⁹
The vanguard of New Democracy was the generation that had come to consciousness during the war, young people who had perhaps been too young to serve in the MPAJA, but were in awe of its patriotic mystique. The MCP targeted school students, many of whom, because of the closure of the Chinese middle schools, were now re-enrolling as young adults, experienced well beyond their years. Successive British
governors were severely taxed by having to explain to ministers why their colony seemed to be continually under threat from schoolchildren. The Party’s principal open organization, the New Democratic Youth League, absorbed a giddying panoply of groups into its ranks: the Penang branch included propaganda, singing and theatrical parties, school unions, basketball and volleyball clubs, hairdressers and barbers, coffee-shop keepers and lion dance troupes.
⁸⁰

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

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.’