figure to the end, disappeared suddenly in early 1946, and little other than rumour was heard of him again. The new chairman, Dr Burhanuddin al-Helmy, was forty-five years of age; he had been schooled at the Penang madrasah of the great Malay modernist reformer Syed Sheihk al-Hadi, and then spent a long sojourn in India, training in homoeopathic medicine at Ismaileah Medical College in Hyderabad, and the Anglo-Muslim College at Aligarh. In India, he had met Jinnah, and became very interested in the cause of Palestine.22 ‘Pak Doktor’, as he was dubbed, possessed an Islamic cosmopolitanism that was unequalled among Malay political leaders, and his nationalism was religiously grounded. Within the MNP different traditions of radical thought were beginning to assemble under the same banner. Malay cadres of the Malayan Communist Party were also regular visitors to ‘Hotel Merdeka’. The most prominent of these were two Perak Malays, Rashid Maidin and Abdullah Che Dat. Rashid, aged twenty-eight, had worked for a mining company as an electrical technician whilst taking a correspondence course in English. He had been recruited into the MCP by Tu Lung Shan, Chin Peng and Eng Ming Chin’s mentor, and had worked as an underground publicist during the war. The 23-year-old Abdullah C.D., as he was known in the party, had attended Clifford School, an English school in Kuala Kangsar. He had been a member of the Kesatuan Melayu Muda but left the movement in protest at its cooperation with the Japanese and instead worked among the Malays for the MPAJA. In the dark days of communal violence, Rashid Maidin and Abdullah C.D. toured the Perak river with Eng Ming Chin’s propaganda troupe to allay Malay fears and broker local understandings. Over the next two years the communists would invest a tremendous amount in the Malay Nationalist Party: it symbolized its growing commitment to ‘Malayanization’ and substantiated its claim to patriotism. In the MNP, Abdullah later wrote, there were ‘branches of many aliran [flows of consciousness] – nationalist, religious, socialist, communist. Yet by taking our aliran out of the equation, we were able to set aside differences, able to unite and cooperate. This was for the sake of a patriotic front that was anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist and loving independence, freedom.’23
THE PASSING OF THE MALAYAN SPRING
The first weeks of 1946 were a period of unprecedented political freedom and experiment that would later become known as the Malayan Spring. The phrase was coined by Han Suyin, a novelist who came to Malaya in 1952. She calculated that around fourteen books of poetry, ninety-six novels – a new form in Malayan Chinese literature – and forty-eight books of essays appeared in Chinese in this period, though by the time of her arrival six years later the parameters of open public debate had shrunk dramatically. To her eyes, intellectual life seemed to have been obliterated entirely, and ‘Special Branch was The Power’. She found that much that had been written in the immediate post-war years was no longer available; the authors could not be traced or, if they could, denied that they had ever written anything.24 But at the time the Malayan Spring was a significant shift in mood, and perhaps more enduring than Han Suyin realized. One writer, styling himself ‘Fu-sheng’, or ‘Revival’, described the change in an essay in New Democracy that marked the fourth anniversary of the Japanese invasion of Malaya, or ‘Twelve-Eight’, as it was now called. Before the war, he wrote, the Chinese in Malaya were ‘just an overseas Chinese and nothing more’.
Then the British lost Malaya in just two months and a week, and the duty of beating the Japanese and regaining Malaya fell on the Malayan people, especially on us Chinese. And so Malaya was reborn thanks to the blood of the Chinese and other revolutionary warriors. The fates of Malaya and our mother country are related. We fight for Malaya and our mother country, while the people of our mother country fight for the country and for Malaya. The mother country is ours, but