The Malayan Emergency
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Souchou Yao Souchou Souchou Yao’s engrossing study of the Malayan Emergency explores critical events in the context of their own time, yet complements painstaking archival research with compelling- THE MALAYAN ly personal fieldwork to achieve an understanding that ‘trav- erses the past and the present’. Yao’s conversations with men Essays on a Small, Distant War and women who were active in the revolutionary struggle of 60 years ago, enable him to rejoin objective history and lived experiences that, in the final analysis, shed light on the brute EMERGENCY reality of colonialism, imperialism, and counter-insurgency, emergency malayan the then and now. m Michael D. Jackson, Distinguished Professor “of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School One of the first conflicts of the Cold War, the Malayan Emergency was a guerrilla war fought between Commonwealth armed forces and communist insurgents in Malaya from 1948 to 1960. Souchou Souchou Yao Yao tells its story in a series of penetrating and illuminating essays that range across a vast canvas – from the protection of rubber and tin for a bankrupt post-war Britain, to the British military violence as a heritage of the Victorian Imperial Policing; from collective punishment to population resettlement of more than half a million Malayans. Throughout the book runs a passionate concern for the lives and struggles of ordinary men and women in colonial Malaya. Here, the effect of counter-insurgency measures are captured by the anthro- pologist’s art of ethnography and cultural analysis. Among the vignettes are an ethnographic encounter with a woman ex-guerrilla, and the author’s remembrance of his insurgent-cousin killed in a police ambush. As such, this fascinating study examines the Emergency afresh, and in the process brings into focus issues not normally covered in other accounts: nostalgia and failed revolution, socialist fantasy and ethnic relations, and the moral costs of modern counter-insurgency. www.niaspress.dk Yao-pbk-cover.indd 1 08/06/2016 09:52 The Malayan Emergency Yao Souchou.indb 1 03/06/2016 13.55 NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies New and recent Monographs 109. Anders Poulsen: Childbirth and Tradition in Northeast Thailand 110. R. A. Cramb: Land and Longhouse 111. Deborah Sutton: Other Landscapes 112. Søren Ivarsson: Creating Laos 113. Johan Fischer: Proper Islamic Consumption 114. Sean Turnell: Fiery Dragons 115. Are Knudsen: Violence and Belonging 116. Noburu Ishikawa: Between Frontiers 117. Jan Ovesen and Ing-Britt Trankell: Cambodians and Their Doctors 118. Kirsten Endres: Performing the Divine 119. Gerhard Hoffstaedter: Modern Muslim Identities 120. Malcolm McKinnon: Asian Cities 121. David I. Steinberg and Hongwei Fan: Modern China–Myanmar Relations 122. Vibeke Børdahl: Wu Song Fights the Tiger 123. Hiromi Sasamoto-Collins: Power and Dissent in Imperial Japan 124. Eren Zink: Hot Science, High Water 125. Monica Janowski: Tuked Rini, Cosmic Traveller 126. Martin Platt: Isan Writers, Thai Literature 127. John Becker: Pattern and Loom 128. Ziayan Zhang: Coping with Calamity 129. Natasha Pairaudeau: Mobile Citizens 130. Halfdan Siiger: The Bodo of Assam 131. Andrew Cock: Governing Cambodia’s Forests 132. John Coast: Recruit to Revolution 133. Souchou Yao: The Malayan Emergency 134. Megha Amrith: Caring for Strangers 135. Sophorntavy Vorng: A Meeting of Masks NIAS Press is the autonomous publishing arm of NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, a research institute located at the University of Copenhagen. NIAS is partially funded by the governments of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden via the Nordic Council of Ministers, and works to encourage and support Asian studies in the Nordic countries. In so doing, NIAS has been publishing books since 1969, with more than two hundred titles produced in the past few years. UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN Nordic Council of Ministers Yao Souchou.indb 2 03/06/2016 13.55 The Malayan Emergency A Small, Distant War Souchou Yao Yao Souchou.indb 3 03/06/2016 13.55 The Malayan Emergency A Small, Distant War by Souchou Yao Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Monograph series, no. 133 First published in 2016 by NIAS Press NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark Tel: +45 3532 9501 • Fax: +45 3532 9549 E-mail: [email protected] • Online: www.niaspress.dk © Souchou Yao 2016 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978 87 7694 190 1 (hbk) ISBN: 978 87 7694 191 8 (pbk) Typeset in Arno Pro 11/14.15 Typesetting by Donald B. Wagner Printed and bound in Great Britain by Marston Book Services Limited, Oxfordshire Yao Souchou front copy.indd 4 15/06/2016 13:26 Contents Illustrations vi Preface vii 1 On Empire: A sleek and orderly retreat 1 2 On Communism: New Person in a New Era 20 3 On Violence: Imperial policing and British counter-insurgency 40 4 On Revolutionary War: Making peasants into revolutionaries 60 5 On ‘Hearts And Minds’ – I: ‘A warm and fuzzy war’ 77 6 On ‘Hearts and Minds’ – II: New Villages and ‘war by philanthropy’ 97 7 On The Malayan Left: The MCP and the ‘National Question’ 116 8 On Junglecraft: Britishness and the ‘Flaming East’ 134 9 On Writing People’s History: Home-grown revolution 154 Bibliography 167 Index 173 v Yao Souchou.indb 5 03/06/2016 13.55 The Malayan Emergency Illustrations Malaya at the time of the Emergency ix Chin Peng receiving military decorations from Lord Mountbatten in 1946 23 Bamboo and palm shelter at a recently abandoned communist insurgent camp, 1956 24 Body of a communist insurgent, shot by Australian soldiers, 1956–58 44 Exposé in the British Daily Worker on 10 May 1952 of widespread British killings in Malaya 45 Captured communist insurgents 49 Forced eviction and relocation of civilians from squatter settlements 54 Identity card from the time of the Emergency 57 Checking of identity papers in Perak state, c. 1956 58 Wounded insurgent being held at gunpoint after his capture, 1952 71 General Sir Gerald Templer 80 Australian troops hunting Communist insurgents in Perak state, c. 1956 82 Leaflet dropped on Malayan insurgents in 1953 offering a $1,000 reward 88 Front page of The Straits Times, 1 May 1952, announcing $250,000 reward for capture of Chin Peng 89 Denial of food and supplies to insurgents 90 Roadside search for food and supplies in Perak state, c. 1956 91 Tan Cheng-Lock 93 New Villages established in 1951 99 Newly completed government-funded resettlement village 100 Entrance to a New Village near Ipoh, Perak state, 1952 101 Sir Henry Gurney inspecting a New Village in Negri Sembilan state 102 Squatter resettlement under the Briggs Plan, 1950 107 A government demand for information 110 Colonel Freddie Spencer Chapman 136 Nona Baker 138 MPAJA guerrillas wearing khaki caps with three red stars 139 vi Yao Souchou.indb 6 03/06/2016 13.55 Preface A friend, a distinguished anthropologist at Harvard, once pronounced in an email, ‘I don’t do social science anymore.’ His latest book recounts the pleasure and intellectual influence from a lifetime’s reading – Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvin, Edna St Vincent Millay, Ted Hughes. I don’t have his fame, or his decades-long appointments in universities across three continents. But I admire his disciplinary verve, and his generosity in showing us a fresh way of unearthing the meanings and significance of a human event. Anthropology is an empirical craft. Its emphasis on fieldwork and ethnog- raphy keeps our feet on the ground; theoretical generalization is built upon the social reality in ‘my village’ or ‘my neighbourhood’. The discipline is evolving. For some practitioners, there is an urgent need to break free from the stricture of social science with its neat prescription of proposition, evidence and final resolution. Works like Shamus Rahman Khan’s Privilege: The Making of an Ado- lescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, and Christine J. Walley’s Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago, for example, illustrate that sociological truth can be garnered from using a freer range of sources and methods: personal mem- oirs, auto-ethnography, novel-like micro descriptions, in addition to interviews and fieldwork. Apart from my own inclination, The Malayan Emergency is an attempt to pitch a tent on the field of the innovative and methodological turn taking place in anthropology and its sister disciplines. Historians and defence study experts have given us detailed and thought- ful accounts of the Malayan insurgency. My contribution is to take the reader, after surveying the trees, to the forest – the postwar conditions facing Great Britain, the strategic calculations of the late British Empire, the social and political circumstances in Malaya, the chancy (mis)calculations of the Empire and the Malayan Communist Party. It seems to me right to stress that to understand the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the Malayan Emergency, these factors mattered; not just the Templer leadership and the British genius of imperial policing. I also believe that a project such as this should ease ourselves into a position of moral judgement. To ape a Maoist saying, the Emergency is a not a dinner party; it was so full of violence, imperial vii Yao Souchou.indb 7 03/06/2016 13.55 The Malayan Emergency greed and political fantasy that very few facts about the conflict can be left unread and unreinterpreted. We share the burden of historical hindsight. Working on the book, I have been struck with unease when young academics and activists have shown a bare awareness of another ‘people’s revolution’ in the region that was the harbinger of communism’s social and moral catastrophe. The Khmer Rouge’s murderous work took place in the then Kampuchea almost next door to us in Malaysia and Singapore.