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The MCP challenged the ascendancy of the secret societies in many areas. Its austere doctrines were incompatible with triad ritual and unattractive to the ‘opium smokers and gentlemen of leisure’ who led these brotherhoods. ‘The Leper’ had been active in triad conflicts with the MPAJA along the Perak coast in the interregnum and, aping a hero of Chinese resistance to the Manchus, continued to send out his ‘tiger generals’ to target MCP sympathizers. In the Dindings area of Perak, open warfare erupted in late 1946 as gangs tried to crush leftist influence, sacking the office of the local trade union and abducting its leaders. The local police refused to protect communists.21 By November 1947 half of the estimated 10,000 triad men in Penang were said to be Kuomintang members, and triads were a source of recruits for the secret Perak army. As the master of the Ang Bin Hoay told the police: ‘The Ang Brotherhood is far less dangerous than the Third International.’ In May 1948 Wah Kei chiefs met and agreed to supply information to the government to help them against the communists. In trade union disputes, Chinese employers called upon the triads to break strikes. The communists too had their own alliances with triads in old MPAJA strongholds. A faction of one triad-based association, the China Chi Kung Tong, set up in the offices of the MCP at Foch Avenue in Kuala Lumpur.22 The extent of these connections is hard to measure, but they made disputes over land and labour lethal.

In early 1948 there were many reasons people might believe that the region was heading towards a climactic conflict. The world crisis was dramatized by Cominform secretary Andrei Zhdanov in his image of ‘two camps’: ‘the imperialist anti-democratic camp’ and the ‘democratic and anti-imperialist camp’. This idea gripped people’s imagination in Southeast Asia. The British saw Zhdanov’s words as a Soviet directive to local communist parties to launch armed insurrections, transmitted through the Calcutta Youth Conference. But in Malaya the communists had already concluded that the hour of reckoning was at hand. The news from Calcutta was carried back to them by Lee Soong, a delegate of the Malayan Communist Party who had been chosen more because of his ability to speak English than for his seniority. But, by the time he returned, the central executive committee of the MCP had already met in Singapore on 17–21 March to resolve once and for all whether or not to prepare for war with the British. The meeting was addressed by the leader of the Australian Communist Party, Lawrence Sharkey, as he passed through Singapore on his return from Calcutta. His high standing in the international movement impressed these young inexperienced revolutionaries in Malaya. But it seems that Sharkey merely confirmed what they already knew, and counselled them to be guided by local conditions. What made the biggest impact on them was his steely advice for dealing with strikebreakers: ‘We get rid of them.’23

The MCP saw its struggle as part of the coming world revolution, but the insurrection, when it came, was the outcome of a local crisis. Chin Peng and his comrades needed to act decisively to demonstrate their authority in the wake of the exposure of Lai Teck, the news of whose treachery had still to be broken to the rank and file. The mood in the Party had hardened. To many of the members, the United Front strategy was a blind alley. Meanwhile, the strong-arm methods adopted by employers against strikers had placed local activists in real danger. When the Central Committee met, its agenda included a copy of draft trade union legislation, stolen from a government printing office by a sympathizer. It was plain that the new law would not allow the Federations of Trade Unions to operate legally, and this was read as decisive evidence that the British were about to move against the MCP itself. The MCP leaders finally abandoned all faith in the reforms of the British Labour government. It had betrayed its true imperialist nature:

The wave of national emancipation