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By Root 4641 0

his old friend and deputy, Yeung Kuo. The following month the full MCP Central Committee assembled for the first time since the declaration of the Emergency. A year had passed. The goal still remained a liberated area, but Party leaders now acknowledged that attacks on the British would have to be smaller in scale. The mood, however, was confident: ‘The more difficult or complicated the situation becomes’, Central’s new directive read, ‘the more our attacks should be positive and active in the sense of holding the initiative.’ And whilst Chin Peng was on the move, Chiang Kai Shek had fled to Taiwan and the armies of the Chinese Communist Party had entered Shanghai. The East was red.46

From February 1949 until the second half of the year there was a lull in the fighting, as the MCP began to build up its mass organization, the Min Yuen. Local units took on a multiplicity of forms, but their functions were similar. There were the unarmed ‘self-protection units’ – the collectors of food and subscriptions, the couriers and propagandists in the villages and towns; an armed ‘protection corps’ for industrial sabotage and small ambushes, and a spectrum of smaller Min Yuen committees or cells of sympathizers.47 Shopkeepers, kongsis and contractors would pay a cess to the Party; labourers would make subscriptions. A Min Yuen cadre was a higher grade position than that of a guerrilla fighter; a higher percentage of them were full Party members. This remained, in the words of a captured leader, ‘a highly coveted honour and not lightly bestowed’. They were more or less in the full-time service of the Party, and were a more regular presence in the villages than any government official. In the village of Semenyih in Selangor, for example, the man in charge of the area adopted various disguises, sometimes as a rubber tapper, sometimes as a coffee-shop worker, even dressing as a coolie woman.48 The British saw all rural Chinese as potential supporters of the MCP.

It was only by the early 1950s that the British began to collect detailed data on who the communists actually were. These surveys were based on intensive interrogations and were conducted for ‘psychological warfare’ purposes, rather than to gather social information. But there are few alternative sources on the background of the fighters. A study of internees at one of the largest rehabilitation camps, Taiping, in 1952 revealed that a high proportion of the Chinese – 36.5 per cent – were of the Hakka dialect group. This was a community of manual labourers, well known for their traditions of self-help and self-government and, throughout Chinese history, for making rebellion. But otherwise the sample was a fair cross-section of the Chinese population in Malaya.49 A survey of 104 surrendered communists in 1953 revealed that 85 per cent were workers, 61 per cent of them rubber tappers, who were a particularly rich source of recruits because their work gave good cover on the borders of the jungle. Forty per cent of those interviewed had aided the communists before joining up; but two-thirds said that fear of arrest or conscription was their primary motive for taking to the jungle. Not only the Emergency Regulations but the repeated arrests of MPAJA men since 1945 weighed heavily in their decision.50 A more in-depth interrogation of twenty-five surrendered guerrillas revealed that all but two had been born in Malaya, or had left China before they were sixteen. Most were too young to have served in the war. Their connections to the MCP came through the New Democratic Youth League or the trade unions, where they had been approached individually, and then drawn into performing tasks for the Party. The report concluded that they came from ‘a section of society that was very poorly structured’. The British writer was here thinking in terms of formal social institutions; there seemed to be little social life for the young beyond the village coffee shop or the workplace. He saw the recruits as disaffected with life, and the appeal of the Party in its ability to formulate their grievances for