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By Root 4488 0

they still looked for inspiration to the struggle for China, their revolutionary patriotism was rooted in a Malayan context, and made emotive by their sacrifices there. Chin Peng was to mourn the loss of Tu Lung Shan, beheaded by the Japanese in Taiping jail in 1943.37 Chin Peng also had many near arrests, but through his underground work as state secretary in Perak he developed his own following. As John Davis reported, he was: ‘Physically robust with round boyish face. Courage marked and commands natural respect without fuss or formality. Quiet character with incisive brain and unusual ability. Frank and reliable. Very likeable.’38 It was a source of ironic pride to Chin Peng that the British officers acknowledged that it was ‘entirely due to him’ that South East Asia Command possessed armed and trained guerrilla allies in Malaya. Yet Chin Peng was also unflinching in the use of violence to attain his objectives. Lai Teck, too, identified him as a useful man.

Chin Peng had arranged the Blantan meetings, and was present at a gathering of party cadres in October 1944 in the jungle near Serendah, some miles north of Kuala Lumpur, at which Lai Teck announced the alliance with South East Asia Command to the surviving MPAJA hierarchy. However, this agreement, he told them, was not to be honoured. The MPAJA was to be split: an ‘open’ army would work with the British, as agreed at Blantan, while the rest of the forces would remain underground. When the Allied invasion came, it would rename itself the National Liberation Army and seize control. Since it would not be possible to hold on to the big urban centres of Singapore, Penang, Kuala Lumpur and Ipoh, the small country towns were to be the base areas of the liberation struggle. ‘It was’, Chin Peng remembered, ‘a rousing call to revolution. Our spirits soared’.39 As this directive filtered through to the jungle, British Force 136 officers in the camps sensed that they were being kept in quarantine, away from many guerrilla units. But there was little they could do about it. These were the first intimate encounters between British soldiers and Asian revolutionary fighters, and they made uneasy comrades. The Europeans experienced the culture shock of a relentless routine of Marxist education, community singing and self-criticism sessions in the camps. Some viewed it in a sympathetic spirit. The sister of a tin miner in Pahang, Nona Baker, who spent most of the occupation hiding with the local guerrillas, wrote an improvised life of Lenin for propaganda purposes.40 But many of the Force 136 recruits had been civilians in Malaya before the war, businessmen or, more often than not, policemen. Although they admired the self-discipline and sacrifice of the guerrillas, they struggled to come to terms with the sight of a rubber tapper or house-boy in arms. A former rubber planter in Kedah stepped down from Force 136 in the field, claiming he could not be party to a policy of co-operation with communists, ‘as I intend to spend many more years in Malaya’.41 Major I. S. Wylie’s assessment of the commander of the 700-strong 5th Independent Regiment of MPAJA in Perak, the formidable Liao Wei Chung, or ‘Colonel Itu’, is typical in its condescension: ‘a man of lowly origins’, he reported, ‘advanced to a position of power and authority which he was not properly fitted to fill’.42 The leader of the 1st Regiment of the MPAJA in Selangor, Liew Yao, might sign off letters to his liaison officer, Major Douglas Broadhurst, formerly of the Singapore Special Branch: ‘chins up and keep smiling, Cheerio’, and end a request for money and arms (and an English–Chinese dictionary), ‘your loving firend [sic], Ah Yeow’.43 But Itu and Wylie, Liew Yao and Broadhurst, would soon be on opposing sides in a new and bitterly personal war.

The MPAJA was primed for revolution, but the sudden surrender of Japan took everyone by surprise, not least Lai Teck. In the days that followed he executed a dramatic volte-face. He summoned Chin Peng to Kuala Lumpur, but did not meet him personally. By the time the younger man