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By Root 4440 0

of Lai Teck, under which Chin Peng had obtained a fake passport for him. ‘He added a “C” in front of “H” so C.H. is Chang Hong and H. Chang is Hong Chang.’65 Chin Peng warned his CCP contact, a worker in the office of the Chinese business daily Hwa Sung. This was corroborated for the Chinese Communist Party by a former Kuala Lumpur Special Branch source then resident in Hong Kong. A few days later, with tremendous audacity, Lai Teck turned up at the same office to meet the CCP representatives. His story was a characteristic double bluff: he told them he had been kidnapped by the British, captured together with his car. He was first imprisoned, then banished to Thailand. He had come to Hong Kong, he said, to report this to the CCP. The CCP representatives demanded to know what his intentions were. To go back, he said, and he asked them for money and travel documents to return to Malaya, via Bangkok.66

This was reported to Chin Peng, but there was little he could do about it. The CCP’s position in Hong Kong was precarious: they would not sanction an assassination in British colonial territory. He gave Lai Teck a couple of days to get away, then followed him on a BOAC flight back to Bangkok. Once again, the Vietnamese underground began a search. After two days they discovered that Lai Teck was in a middle-range hotel. When the Vietnamese went to the address, they discovered that he had checked out. The next morning Chin Peng was told of this by a Vietnamese contact, and they concluded that he had ‘probably found some company’. But, once again, it was Lai Teck who had calmly taken the initiative. He had contacted the Thai communists and had, in fact, left his hotel for a rendezvous with them. A few days later Chin Peng had to return to Penang. Before he left, he paid a courtesy call to Li Chee Shin, the leader of the Communist Party of Thailand. He asked about Lai Teck. Li responded quietly in Mandarin, ‘He’s no more.’ Li would give no further details, and none would emerge until a meeting in Peking in 1950, when MCP members met one of the Thai men who had been sent to meet Lai Teck, and heard the story of his demise. Three Thai heavies, young and inexperienced, had been sent to the rendezvous, where they kidnapped Lai Teck. Their orders were to bring him to interrogation, but Lai Teck, a small, frail man, began to shout, and there was a struggle: ‘They strangled him for a certain amount of time and suffocated him. He died on the spot. According to the Thai[s], they just put him in a gunny-sack, and then tossed him in the Menam River.’ Chin Peng returned to Malaya to be met with the news that he had been awarded the Order of the British Empire for his wartime services. His uncle took him to a Western restaurant in Ipoh to celebrate.67

The crisis was kept under wraps for most of 1947. The enquiry had taken a long time; only in December was a report finalized. It was filtered through the Party hierarchy so that the new leadership could gauge reactions carefully. It was the end of May 1948 before a statement by the Central Committee was published for the Party and the world at large. The document – ‘A written statement on L[ai] Teck’s case’ – correlates in its main themes, if not the details, with the account given by Chin Peng many years later: they are both, in a sense, authorized versions of the story. The ‘Lai Teck Document’ began with a short account of his rise to power in the Party in a time of ‘unprepared state of thought’ and of the steady loss of other leaders. ‘Following a well-calculated plan he posed as a sacrosanct “hero”’, it explained; ‘he had held up high the “International Signboard”’. But the document reveals little about his relationship with the British, saying only that ‘the possibility of his having conspired with the Imperialists was very great’. It emphasized instead his betrayals in wartime and his corruption. The document took particular pains to explain why his treachery had gone undiscovered for so long: ‘very few comrades’, it reported, ‘had any idea of his mode of living, for he was really a “mysterious