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By Root 4397 0

the Vietnamese girl ran a bar in the Hill Street area.60 He had, it was later estimated, absconded with $130,000 in cash, 170 gold coins and 23 taels of gold.61 Two months after his departure, at a party plenum meeting in May, Lai Teck was exposed and expelled from the MCP as a Japanese spy. Chin Peng was elected Secretary General. He was still only twenty-three years old. Yeung Kuo became his deputy. Yeung Kuo broke the news of Lai Teck’s betrayals to his wife in Malaya, who was an old schoolfriend of his. She had just borne Lai Teck’s child, but according to Chin Peng, her response was resigned: ‘Then I suppose you must kill him.’ The house in Katong was staked out by the MCP, and secret contacts were called upon to discover if he was in Outram prison.62

Few members of the Party, outside its innermost circle, knew anything about these events. The Lai Teck personality cult remained strong; too strong for his followers to accept the news of his treachery without hard evidence. After all, the Party survived on ruthless, iron discipline. In July senior leaders were sent on Lai Teck’s trail. Chen Tian led a delegation to Prague to the World Federation of Democratic Youth Convention and, en route, visited Soviet officials in Paris to enquire if Lai Teck had escaped to Europe and to investigate his credentials as a Comintern representative. Chin Peng went to Hong Kong; it was the first time he had left the country. Using his cover as a businessman he travelled to Bangkok by train, arriving in early July. The city remained an important arms bazaar and haven for the Asian underground.63 He stayed at the Vietnamese delegation – an unofficial mission of the Viet Minh – and requested help from both the Vietnamese and Thai communists in tracking down Lai Teck. Chin Peng was there two weeks, but no progress was made. Shortly before he left he was taken by a Thai communist comrade to the Cathay Pacific airline office on Suriwong Road to collect his onward ticket to Hong Kong. As he later described it, on the way back by trishaw his eyes were scanning the oncoming traffic when suddenly his attention was caught by a man on the opposite side of the street: ‘He was standing with his back to us and seemingly in the middle of a transaction with a cigarette vendor. There was something about the body language. As we moved with the traffic I couldn’t take my eyes off the figure. We then came to a position where I was looking directly back at the man’s face. It was Lai Te[ck], all right. He was taking a first puff on a freshly lit cigarette. He raised his head and appeared to look in my direction.’ Chin Peng ducked back behind the canopy of his trishaw and told his Thai companion to order the driver to turn back. By the time they had done so, Lai Teck had boarded a motorized trishaw taxi – a tuk tuk – and they could not keep pace with him. Chin Peng returned to the office of the Vietnamese communists in Bangkok; they mobilized their armed underground, confident of finding any renegade in the city. Chin Peng left as planned for Hong Kong.64

The events that followed, as Chin Peng later recalled them, read as a ‘sort of fiction’. In Hong Kong Chin Peng reported to the CCP representatives on the disappearance and treachery of Lai Teck. They too, it seemed, had harboured suspicions about him, and found him evasive about his past. In his encounters with representatives of the CCP, Lai Teck had not dared to use the cover story he had employed in Malaya, that he was a Comintern agent. In Hong Kong, Chin Peng was asked to lie low whilst the CCP representatives consulted their superiors in Shanghai. He kicked his heels in a cheap hotel in Nathan Road, Kowloon, reading the Chinese and English newspapers, visiting the cinemas and travelling the Star Ferry to Hong Kong Island to kill time. It was on a return trip, scanning the advertisements and notices in the South China Morning Post, that he stumbled on a column of the previous day’s arrivals and departures. Arriving by Cathay Pacific from Bangkok was a C. H. Chang. This sounded like ‘Chang Hong’, an alias