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By Root 4531 0

special rights of the Malay people. It was a return to indirect rule: new treaties with the Malay rulers, as Onn repeatedly emphasized, were an endorsement of Malay sovereignty. The new legal entity was to be termed the Persekutuan Tanah Melayu, a federation of Malay lands. The constitution enshrined a stringent legal definition of a ‘Malay’, but none for a ‘Malayan’. There was to be no ‘Malayan’ nationality.113 The constitution conceded citizenship rights to non-Malays, but whereas under the Malayan Union these would have extended to 83 per cent of the Chinese and 75 per cent of the Indians, far fewer people would now qualify.114 For the British this was a major retreat from the idealism of the Malayan Union. But when the final proposals went to the cabinet in July, the colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, viewed the future with some complacency. He believed that 90 per cent of the original strategic objectives of the Union had been secured, particularly the creation of a stronger, more cohesive central government and a common citizenship. Singapore remained outside the Federation, but this was the price of Anglo-Malay accord, and the growing divisions in policy between the two territories made the prospect of union in the future increasingly unlikely. Creech Jones reassured colleagues that the new constitution was opposed only by a ‘noisy minority’.115

The proposals were put to a consultative committee of local dignitaries. Up until this point the British had assumed that non-Malays were, at best, indifferent to constitutional change. Support for the Malayan Union had been muted. Many non-Malays still thought in terms of dual citizenship with their country of birth; they were alienated by the exclusion of Singapore, and the left had argued that the Union was undemocratic, negotiated with ‘feudal remnants’ and not the people. But, as the Anglo-Malay entente deepened after mid-1946, Chinese associations mobilized to defend the Union’s more liberal provisions for citizenship. It was clear that the status of non-Malays was more insecure than ever; the gateway to citizenship had narrowed and the prospects for a democratic Malaya, of which Singapore was seen as an indivisible part, had receded.116 Leaders were incensed at the limited nature of the consultation. The two leading Chinese members of the consultative committee were H. S. Lee and a leading Perak Chinese, Leong Yew Koh, both of whom held Kuomintang military rank. As John Eber of the Malayan Democratic Union observed bitterly, ‘What right have colonels in the Chinese army, owing presumably their undivided loyalty to China, to adjudicate or speak on behalf of the people of Malaya?’ In late 1946, to speak for Malaya, the Malayan Democratic Union took a central role in the formation of the Pan-Malayan Council of Joint Action (later the All-Malayan Council of Joint Action, AMCJA). At its inaugural meeting in Kuala Lumpur on 19 November it rejected all existing Anglo-Malay agreements; it boycotted the consultative committee and demanded recognition as ‘the only body that speaks for all Asiatic communities’.

The AMCJA was an attempt to draw together the various aliran, or flows of consciousness, within radical politics in Malaya, and all of them, at one time or another, would claim to have been its inspiration. The Malayan Communist Party, sensing that here there was political capital to be made, encouraged the initiative. Its open representative, the journalist Liew Yit Fan, attended the inaugural meeting, and although the Party never joined the AMCJA, its main satellite organizations, the New Democratic Youth League and the Federations of Trade Unions, were its largest components.117 But equally prominent, and entirely unprecedented, was the presence of leaders of the Malay Nationalist Party. With UMNO increasingly allied to the colonial government, the Malay radicals saw that they could not go it alone: ‘we shall safeguard our special rights’, it announced, ‘but we cannot carry on an isolated fight – isolation means defeat’. It now sought a common front against feudalism