• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4474 0

by racial prejudice. A stock view was that the Chinese were a busy and conspiratorial people, more interested in money than in politics, and responsive chiefly to intimidation and force. As a specialist of the old Chinese Protectorate put it: the heart of Chinese society was ‘the secret society complex’.104 These sage saws were drawn upon by the new high commissioner, Henry Gurney, and shaped his approach to countering terrorism. In one of his first despatches to Creech Jones, Gurney wrote that ‘it is universally agreed here that the support which [the communists] get is almost wholly through intimidation and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as “popular”… The truth is the Chinese are accustomed to acquiesce to pressure.’105 The British continually played down the political roots of the rebellion. This encouraged the view, prevalent in mid 1948, that a show of force against ‘bad hats’ would be enough to restore the situation. The cannier officials were aware that the government had no understanding of what the ordinary Chinese men and women were thinking. Many lamented the demise of the Protectorate and the local knowledge that had been lost in the war. Eighteen months into the Emergency, of the 256 Malayan Civil Service officers, only 23 had passed the Chinese-language exams and 16 were learning it. The main consequence of this, a group of Chinese specialists in Singapore argued, was that the Chinese were still almost wholly disconnected from government and possessed a deep-rooted aversion to authority and avoided it when they could. ‘They are bewildered and because the British have failed once they are afraid that they may fail again.’106

This had tragic consequences. Under the terms of the Emergency Regulations, aversion or evasion implied guilt. Few military operations took Chinese interpreters with them. In November the rules were amended to allow a chief police officer to declare ‘special areas’ in which anyone called to stop and be searched, and who failed to do so, might be shot.107 The designation of the war as an ‘anti-bandit campaign’ did not help understanding. In the lexicon of empire, ‘banditry’ was a catch-all word for evil; it criminalized the communists, and the Chinese community as a whole, and this did not encourage officials, soldiers or policeman to reflect on the social and political issues that were at stake, or to make distinctions between degrees of guilt and innocence.108 It encouraged in professional soldiers contempt for the adversary, and a tendency to underestimate his tenacity and intelligence. For the conscript, it was a recipe for fear and perplexity. As one recalled: ‘No one appeared to be quite sure of the size of the problem or where the danger was coming from. Many of us couldn’t tell the difference between Malays and Chinese and it was all very confusing.’109 This was the first time British regular forces had engaged in jungle fighting in the Malayan terrain. (The war of 1941–2 had not been a forest campaign.) It was, for many, a nightmarish experience. The British soldiers in the front line were often ill trained and inexperienced, and they were up against hardened, bloodied veterans. Chin Peng described his first close encounter with British troops, at Ayer Kuning in Perak in July. His own men had been strafed from the air and, with a Dakota circling above, the troops were searching and burning the long grass to draw out the communists. ‘They were’, he remarked, ‘very white and very young.’ They never discovered Chin Peng, who slipped by them during a cloudburst.110

THE ROAD TO BATANG KALI

Chin Peng was in Ayer Kuning to pick up an escort to take him to safety. He had spent the first days of the Emergency holed up in a house in Ipoh. Hidden in the back of a biscuit delivery van, he moved to a village in the Sungei Manik area of Perak to meet with Perak units to discuss the situation. The communist high command was non-existent. His deputy, Yeung Kuo, was in Selangor and plans for a Central Committee meeting had to be set aside. The MCP’s military objectives