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evidence that the Chinese communists had even the most distant relationship with the red- or white-flag communists in Burma before 1948,37 but Burmese translations of Mao’s works began to appear in large numbers in the early months of that year. Mao’s military language and insistence that the peasantry could be the vanguard of revolution appealed to young people whose world had already been turned upside down once in their short lives. It meant much more than the arid, Moscow-style logic chopping of orthodox communists and their Bengali admirers. Even the British embassy began to hear rumours of Mao. They telegraphed to London asking for English translations of his works. Yet no one in London seemed to know who he was.

Hari Narayan Ghosal and his allies must have sensed this change in public mood, so rather than risk being caught off guard by an outbreak of unco-ordinated popular uprisings in the delta and the north, they began in the early weeks of 1948 to plan a co-ordinated uprising for the late spring. Ghosal adhered to what was called a ‘working-class’ strategy. This involved the formation in the towns of armed workers’ militias. Than Tun and Ba Thein, two other leaders, favoured creating ‘base areas’ among the peasantry in what was rapidly becoming known as a Maoist strategy. In this ‘semi-feudal’ country, ignoring the peasantry was not an option. Ghosal himself addressed a mass meeting of hundreds of thousands of peasants in March 1948, promising them land and no taxes.38 The idea was apparently to move in March and April to create a series of communist-controlled base areas which would cut the country in two and isolate Rangoon from Mandalay. Then, as the monsoon set in and the already stretched and immobile government forces became bogged down in the mud, these base areas could be linked together. A working-class rising in the Rangoon docks and the southern oil installations would accompany a coup d’état which would foreshadow victory over imperialism and the Burmese bourgeoisie. As it was, the government, which was partially informed of these plans, made the first move. On 23 March several communist leaders were rounded up by the police and interrogated, but the operation was bungled and many of the most important leaders scattered into the hinterland.39

By 1 April the political situation in the country was very uneasy and a week later the typical signs of a Burmese insurrection were plain to see. Telegraph wires and bridges were sabotaged across the delta and police stations were under attack in a way reminiscent of the revolt against the Japanese three years earlier. Some of those more traditional symptoms of a coming uprising which generations of British officials were taught to expect had also begun to appear. People had their skin tattooed to ward off evil and insurgents tried to make themselves invulnerable to government bullets with spells.40 The old prophecies of the 1880s about Burma’s future were ransacked once again and spirit dancers at the nat spirit shrines mouthed apocalyptic premonitions. Villages were burned and police stations attacked across a wide range of territory in the south and the north-central part of the country. The six-month-long ‘Boys’ Day’ party abruptly broke up in tears. James Bowker, the British ambassador, described ‘a state of mind bordering on panic’ in the Rangoon secretariat.41 To add to its troubles, the government got into a long slugging match with the press about one of Burma’s periodic political sex scandals. The minister of agriculture was accused of seducing a ‘respectable’ married woman. The minister denied this and the AFPFL leadership began attacking newspapers and encouraging mobs to destroy several newspaper offices and presses. It mattered little that the public later discovered that the woman concerned had gone through no fewer than five husbands before she was twenty-four and, in Furnivall’s Victorian parlance, was ‘no better than a baggage’.42 The two years of press freedom which Burma had enjoyed effectively came to an end, never to return.

The government