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The ‘running dog’ policy formulated and carried out by him was characteristically ‘rightist’ and traitorous to the cause of the revolution, but that policy had always been implemented as being ‘leftist’ or in some cases smacking of ‘leftist’, so it had not been easy for comrades to discover any serious mistakes or danger in it.

Above all, the ‘Lai Teck Document’ was written to exonerate the new Party leadership from his political errors. Lai Teck was the ‘greatest culprit in the history of our Party’; but his was a case of ‘individual conspiracy with the enemy’. He had recruited no accomplices and nurtured no successors. The entire Party had to accept responsibility for the deception. There was to be no general witchhunt. There was no opportunity for one. By the time the report was published, the MCP was four weeks away from its climactic confrontation with the British.68

The news was met by confusion and anger, a feeling, voiced in the report, that ‘our past work was done in vain, that we have to start everything all over again’.69 A middle-ranking Perak leader described the mood on the ground: ‘Some MCP veterans may be disgusted and discouraged. They will be unwilling to suffer hardships… weall feel that we are getting a raw deal as compared with the higher officials… The supreme leaders had always in the past used the slogan “Let’s Struggle Together”, but this was only in words and not in deeds.’70 Lai Teck was a convenient scapegoat for the failure of the MCP after the war to convert its open-front strategy and broad public appeal into revolutionary success. Yet the unmasking of the traitor did not mean the immediate abandonment of Lai Teck’s line. The advice of the Chinese Communist Party to Chin Peng in 1947 was that the decision to move to armed revolution could only be taken in the light of local circumstances. For the Party, the last months of 1947 were a time of reconstruction, of making closer contact with the masses, and reimposing its leadership on them. Supporters of Lai Teck, suspected ‘rightist deviationists’, were placed on probation.71 But the decisive break with the past had yet to occur, and the united-front policy had yet to run its full course.

Questions continued to be asked within the Party. The Singapore MCP open representative at the time, Chang Meng Ching, later claimed that Lai Teck had left because the British were blackmailing him to force him to expose the hidden arms caches. Defectors from the Party in the 1950s, such as vice-president of the Pan-Malayan Federation of Trade Unions, Lam Swee, challenged the Party’s account of Lai Teck’s treachery, and even suggested that Chin Peng himself was behind the Batu Caves massacre of 1942, or had at least manufactured the charge that Lai Teck was responsible, in a plot to seize control of the Party. Over the long years of insurrection this was to become a staple of British and Malaysian black propaganda against Chin Peng.72 Lai Teck’s career must be set in context of the many deceptions, covert alliances and secret understandings made and later repudiated, that proved so pivotal to the course of the war and end of empire in Asia. The revolutionary underground was a fluid world which left few of those who moved in it uncompromised. Many MCP members had gone into business for the party or on their account with the spoils of war: the Party had invested $70,000 in a tin mine in Kampar; it also had stakes in the Lido Hotel in Singapore, the Lucky World Amusement Park in Kuala Lumpur and another $100,000 invested in other small business.73 Few were immune to the glamour of insurrection; this was why, despite all the misgivings about him, Lai Teck commanded a loyal following and was, by all accounts, such a compelling presence. In 1971 Gerald de Cruz, by then a communist apostate himself, wrote of him: ‘I am sure he had been involved with both the Japanese and the British authorities – what revolutionary worth his salt does not find himself in such situation from time to time with his “establishment” – and that these were raked up and exaggerated