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arrived on 19 August, Lai Teck had just left for Johore and Singapore in the south. Chin Peng instead met another of the Party’s new generation of leaders, Yeung Kuo, who – in some distress – informed him that the MPAJA would not, after all, fight the British. Lai Teck had drawn up a new policy: an ‘eight-point programme’. Its first two points were support for the Allies and the pursuit of an open democratic struggle. It was bland enough to receive the endorsement of the British high command: Mountbatten’s Foreign Office adviser, Esler Dening, called it ‘irreproachable’. ‘The Communist Party have rather stolen our thunder’, he complained.44 Lai Teck ordered both the ‘open’ and the ‘secret’ MPAJA to disband; the only concession to armed struggle was that the Party would hold on to its secret caches of arms. To Chin Peng, and to all who had fought and suffered in the jungle, this was ‘a devastating blow’. To his surprise he learned that Lai Teck had made him responsible for implementing the new policy, by appointing him to a new three-man Central Military Committee, together with Lai Teck and the Selangor commander, Liew Yao. Chin Peng was only twenty years of age. Despite his private misgivings, he submitted to Lai Teck’s directive – after all, he later reflected, ‘he was the Comintern’s man’ – and Chin Peng was swayed by the belief, shared by many in the MPAJA, that they had already won legal recognition from the British. He also assumed that the full Central Committee was behind the decision not to fight. In fact Lai Teck was covering his tracks, and had acted on his own.45

It was unclear to the British what the peacetime role of the MPAJA was to be. Mountbatten’s initial bland directive – ‘Victory is now at hand and your contribution has been important and is appreciated’ – did not impress the guerrillas. Nor did his stipulation that the MPAJA should avoid towns and districts where the Japanese were present. There was, as John Davis radioed the supremo four days after the surrender, ‘a serious risk of disastrous anti-climax’. To Davis, the status of the MPAJA as soldiers under SEAC was crucial: they ‘must be given full share in the honour of victory’. ‘Orders for them to remain half-starved in the hills while the Allies leisurely take over the administration from the Japs will not be reasonable.’ Davis was also worried that, if they remained in the jungle, all control over them would be lost.46 Davis was overridden by Mountbatten’s advisers. General Sir William Slim carried the day by arguing that the guerrillas could upset the delicate ceasefire with the Japanese. Mountbatten relented slightly by allowing the guerrillas to move into towns if they could avoid clashes with the Japanese. He had for months urged the British cabinet to trumpet its liberal intentions for Malaya in order that the tensions of reoccupation might be eased, but to no avail. In London Davis’s views were dismissed as part of a pattern whereby liaison officers in the field went native and ‘become rather imbued with the views of the resistance movement to which they are attached’.47 Already, vague wartime understandings were being repudiated.

The MPAJA met its moment of revolutionary crisis in a state of confusion and with no central direction. Some jungle companies received Lai Teck’s new directive, others did not. Some who did receive the orders fought on anyway. As the Japanese began to withdraw from many settlements, MPAJA fighters wearing their new SEAC jungle green with three stars on their forage caps, moved to capture village police stations and arms and supply dumps. The Japanese military claimed that in the fifteen days after the surrender there were 212 attacks on its troops. The MPAJA seized transport, and for the first time enjoyed swift mobility. In many areas they began to set up skeleton administrations in the form of ‘people’s committees’: according to one estimate, 70 per cent of rural towns were under their control.48 There they took over public buildings, and in some instances burned land-office records. The ability of Force 136