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By Root 4511 0

4,000 and 5,000 men and women in arms, organized into eight regionally based regiments; there were several thousand more workers in the towns and villages and the number was rapidly rising. The British had some information on the workings of the Malayan Communist Party, but only a hazy view of its higher command. There did not, Tremlett reported, seem to be a standing committee in any one place; leadership was in the hands of a man known as ‘Mr Wright’, the party’s ‘most secret and revered personality. He is known to Davis, myself and one or two others. He is a shrewd and clever man but no fanatic.’ Then there was ‘Chang Hong’, the man who led the negotiations in the jungle.31

It seems that Davis and his friends failed to recognize ‘Chang Hong’, and did not realize that he and ‘Mr Wright’ were one and the same person. But Freddy Spencer Chapman had met him, masked with dark glasses, along with Tremlett in December 1941, in a room above a charcoal dispensary in the Geylang area of Singapore. It was the secret rendezvous where they had negotiated the arming of the Malayan Communist Party. ‘Chang Hong’ had appeared at their jungle meetings without dark glasses, and at the second meeting was wasted by illness, and leaning heavily on a stick. He was a man of many guises, a political phantom whose name, background and motivations remain deeply obscure to this day. From the best available accounts, his given name seems to have been Hoang A Nhac, and he was born in Nghe Tinh province in Vietnam, of Chinese or Chinese-Annamese descent, though he could neither read nor write Chinese. In 1945 he was perhaps in his early forties.32 Only a Special Branch photograph of him survives; it shows a lean-faced man of ambiguous ethnicity, with large deep-set eyes, marks of dissipation perhaps. He is staring at the camera with thin-lipped severity, later to be recalled as cold callousness, ‘like the treacherous villain in a Chinese opera’.33 He came to prominence in Singapore around 1934, a rising star in the Malayan Communist Party. His growing mystique derived from his claim to be a representative of the Comintern. Few communists in Malaya were so well travelled, so well informed on world affairs. Of the many aliases he used in this period, the name that has endured is Lai Teck: it seems the British thought this was merely a Chinese mispronunciation of the English name ‘Wright’, and so ‘Mr Wright’ became yet another layer of pseudonymity.34

Lai Teck’s early career is an extraordinary journey across the underground of the port cities of Asia; the stuff of the cloak-and-dagger fiction so popular in the region at this time. Lai Teck liked to surround himself in its aura. He became a convert to communism in Saigon in the 1920s, but then he joined the French navy, only to flee when faced with arrest for disseminating communist literature among his fellow sailors. He reappeared in Hong Kong and from there travelled through the revolutionary circles of Shanghai and Tientsin. In 1931, in a strange sequence of events, he was arrested at Mukden on the Soviet border, apparently en route to Moscow, and was imprisoned in a Chinese jail, only to be released in a general amnesty when the Japanese invaded Manchuria. He then retraced his steps to Shanghai, where he was again arrested in the French concession and deported to Vietnam. Given a choice between prison and co-operation with the Surété, Lai Teck chose the life of a double agent. His career was short lived: in 1934, whilst working undercover in Annam, he was exposed and, useless now to the French, Lai Teck was gifted to the British in Hong Kong. Special Branch supplied Lai Teck with communist documents they had seized in raids in Hong Kong and Shanghai. These were to authenticate a cover story that he was a Comintern agent sent to advise the Malayan Communist Party. He was then introduced into Singapore as an informer. His betrayals over the next few years assisted his rise in the Party’s secret hierarchy. By 1939 he had been elected Secretary General, and was known by the rank and file as ‘Ah Le