Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [250]
THE FRONTIER ERUPTS
The crucible of the coming struggles was the Kinta valley of Perak. In the nineteenth century it had been Southeast Asia’s Klondike and it remained its industrial heartland. The area is formed by two granite masses: the central range of the peninsula – which rises to heights of around 2,108 metres in the north – and a spur, the Kledang range, that forms the watershed between the Kinta and Perak rivers. The valley – around 58 kilometres north to south and 45 kilometres east to west – is edged by towering limestone outcrops. This frontier region was opened up by large-scale tin mining in the hills, and modern dredging methods were first pioneered in the swamps of the coastal plain. The hillsides were edged with rubber plantations. In Kinta the delicate pluralism of rural Malaya could be seen in microcosm. Large concentrations of Chinese and Indian labour lived alongside Malay kampongs that stretched down to the lowlands. It was Malaya’s most urbanized area: over half of the population lived in the towns or main villages. The main settlement, Ipoh, dominated the region. It was an important centre of education and printing, a place of political initiation for men like Chin Peng and Wu Tian Wang of the MCP. The Malay Nationalist Party was launched in Ipoh, and it was a centre, too, of UMNO’s organization. Ipoh was built by Chinese millionaries and its markets were supplied by Chinese peasant farmers. In hard times this was a brutal juxtaposition of wealth and want. The urban world and the forest were never far apart. In the war, the dense networks of roads and estate and mining tracks, the hidden limestone caves and jungle trails, had made it an ideal terrain for guerrilla armies to operate. From Kinta the mountain forests stretched eastwards almost to the coast and connected the central spine of the peninsula from the Thai border to the badlands of central Johore in the south.34 Kinta witnessed first blood between the British and the MCP in October 1945, when troops opened fire on demonstrators in Sungei Siput. And in June 1948 this small town would be the spark that ignited the Malayan revolution.
Kinta was home to the largest concentrations of Chinese squatters in Malaya: perhaps 94,000 out of the district’s total population of around 281,500. Most of them were on mining land.35 Numbers had risen in the war, and the British expectation was that, in peacetime, they would drift back to the towns and mines. But food and work remained scarce. The Chinese mines faced discrimination in the allocation of rehabilitation loans and many small labour-intensive mines stopped producing altogether. In 1948, the mining labour force was below a third of its 1940 level, and at the middle of the year there were up to 28,000 unemployed workers in the area. But a major change had taken place in the rural economy. When men returned to wage labour, they left their families behind in the squatter hamlets. For the first time Malaya possessed a permanent population of Chinese peasant farmers. This broke down the old ethnic division of labour whereby food growing was the preserve of the kampong Malays living in designated ‘Malay reservations’. And whereas single males had once lived collectively in the kongsi, or communal hut, now a labourer usually had his own hut in which to raise his children. Between the censuses of 1931 and 1947, the proportion of children in Perak had risen from 25.6 to 39.3 per cent; the number of local-born Chinese from 31 to 65 per cent. Like Indians on the