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By Root 4502 0

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 written 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;