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the city. But when he returned to Malaya in 1948 he was faced with a three-way choice between exile, detention and the underground. His friends invited him to join them in the jungle. As he explained in a political testimony in 1957, written in a British jail: ‘One is always drawn by the desire to fight colonialism and the urge to join up with those who are fighting hardest is irresistible. It often appears that to refuse to join such allies is to be dishonest to one’s anti-colonial principles. But in such an alliance one is always tormented by the fundamental differences one has with one’s allies.’76 William Kuok was killed by the security forces in 1953–as Lim Hong Bee wrote many years later – ‘his body desecrated by men who could probably not tell the difference between Dostoevsky and a doughnut or an iambic from a tropical itch’.77 Some of those caught up in the white terror of 1948 and after would survive to play a part in national life. But many did not. The Emergency extorted a high toll in political talent. For this reason, many felt an enduring resentment at what the MCP had done. The Party, as much as the British, had refused to allow a free trade unionism to strengthen and mature. It had betrayed the political hopes of the Malayan Spring. In Hoalim’s words: ‘Now the precipitate action of the Communist Party to violence had brought to an end our effort for national unity and democracy for a new Malayan nation, as it was plain that the Emergency would not allow genuine democratic activity to continue until the Communists had been defeated. How long this would take was uncertain.’78

STEN GUNS AND STENGAHS

For some time the British remained unsure as to what exactly they were fighting in Malaya. The first written report to the cabinet on 1 July blamed ‘gangsters’ for the violence. ‘The trouble is almost certainly Communist-instigated,’ Creech Jones argued, ‘though direct connection between the gangsters and the Communist Party cannot always be traced.’ This remained the position when the cabinet first discussed the crisis on 13 July. It was not until 19 July that the Labour government, at Malcolm MacDonald’s urging, accepted that the MCP should be banned. On 23 July the MCP, the MPAJA Ex-Comrade’s Association, the New Democratic Youth League and PETA were all outlawed. But even at this stage Attlee personally amended the parliamentary statement to make it clear that the decision was taken on the basis of MacDonald’s personal assessment, in order to distance his ministers from it. Creech Jones believed that success in Malaya was ‘a vital step in the “Cold War” against communism in the East’ and MacDonald’s public statements spoke of the ‘hand of Moscow and the rule of gun and knife’. But the search for hard evidence of a Moscow-directed ‘plot’ dragged on for many years.79

The British were also unsure as to what to call the guerrillas. MacDonald caused panic by referring to them as ‘insurgents’ in a radio broadcast. This threatened the insurance cover for the estates and mines; they were protected against ‘riot and civil commotion’, but not ‘rebellion or insurrection’. Above all, officials were desperate to avoid any words ‘which might suggest a genuine popular uprising’.80 The Gurkhas in the front line called the guerrillas alternately ‘Congress’, or daku, dacoit.81 The British settled on ‘bandit’. This had a ‘fine minatory ring’, but it was also an ambiguous term. The Japanese had described the MPAJA as ‘bandits’ during the war. It conferred on the MCP the glamour of the people’s resistance and invoked the Robin Hood figures of Chinese folklore. The rhetoric of Cold War brushed aside these semantic niceties. By 1952 the guerrillas were termed ‘Communist terrorists’ – ‘CT’ in more clinical usage – and it was axiomatic that the Malayan Emergency was an arm of the global Soviet conspiracy. But the underlying anxiety persisted. In the words of a senior mandarin, Sir Thomas Lloyd: ‘The dividing line between the terrorist and the fighter for freedom is not always so clear in the minds of the outside world or the people