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By Root 4504 0

to point out that the Japanese and British governments had actively encouraged them to open up land for food. But they also invoked a larger principle. In the Malay States, it was a local tradition, enshrined in colonial practice, that the man who brought jungle into cultivation and maintained it had a proprietorial right to it. Peasants now asked: ‘Why do the Chinese have no freedom of cultivation yet the Malays enjoy these privileges?’41 The British saw the red ink of communist propaganda in these demands. Yet it was clear that the squatters were now firmly rooted in a complex rural economy. They exploited the forest; they took rubber on a self-tap, self-sell basis. A typical family of five worked on an average three acres of land, and supported ten other families in the towns. According to one estimate, 95 per cent of Malaya’s population was dependent on squatter production in one way or another. In Perak they not only supplied rice and vegetables but 5,000 pigs a month, 12,688 fowl and 200,000 duck and hen’s eggs. Yet the squatters themselves were poor: their average family income was only $150 a month.42 Above all, they demanded to stay in areas where their families had put down roots, and where they had been living as more or less self-governing communities. ‘We find it very difficult to redistribute the land again’, they explained, ‘for the farmers want to preserve their former allotments and disputes and fights will start [trouble] if a redistribution is forced upon them.’43 At a mass meeting in Sungei Siput, farmers emphasized their suffering during the Japanese occupation. It was an area of counter-insurgency operations against the communists and they had been caught in the middle of it.44 But what stiffened the government’s resolve to move against the squatters was its belief that it was losing political control of these areas. Both British and Chinese employers sensed an opportunity to tame their industrial labour.

When forest officers began to tear up crops, the protests turned violent. One official, D. Speldewinde, described an incident when he entered a squatter area in Changkat Jong with some Malay assistants to pull up some illegal tapioca plants:

The young man made a speech and ended in Malay, saying, ‘We were not afraid of the Japs and we are not afraid of the British. Don’t you think you can do these things to Chinese and get away with it… All of a sudden this young Chinese shouted, ‘pak ung mor’ [Beat up the ‘red hair’] and about thirty of them dived in surrounding tapioca bushes and each seized a spear and came towards us on the run. Two of the forest workers ran away and then we were surrounded. All I could do was to take a parang and prepare to defend myself.

Some older men intervened and saved Speldewinde and his men. The young firebrand was later arrested. It turned out he was president of the local peasants’ union.45 The membership of Chinese rubber-workers’ unions and peasants’ unions overlapped. They shared the same offices and framed their demands in similar terms. When evictions of squatters occurred at the same time as dismissals and evictions from rubber estates, the situation for the rural Chinese became desperate and the mood explosive. The situation in Perak came to a head with a new wave of strike action, led by the MCP Indian labour organizer R. G. Balan. He toured estates raising the tempo of protest: European managers, he said, would be nothing but coolies in their own country, but in Malaya they lived in luxury and obtained beautiful cars by exploiting the workers. Once again, estate managers sent their wives and families to the towns for safety.46 By May there were calls for resistance to the police. Workers were told to grow food and maintain strikes as long as possible. They were told not to fear arrest; this would add pressure to the government, who would have to build jails to house them and buy food to feed them. The disputes moved to the larger estates, where living conditions were better, and their political motives were clear. At the Lima Blas and Kelapa Bali estates in