Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [290]
A stated aim of the MCA was ‘to promote and assist in the maintenance of peace and good order’. Gurney insisted on this: he had originally wanted to use the word ‘collaborate’, but this had evil connotations with the Japanese occupation.103 Gurney saw an opportunity for the state to make a direct connection with its Chinese subjects. The number of ‘Chinese affairs officers’ grew in number, and MCA leaders were co-opted onto ‘Chinese Advisory Committees’. These were the scene of bitter exchanges: businessmen complained of their lack of protection compared to the European mines and estates, and that when they gave information no action was taken.104 The ‘distrust and dislike’ of the police was universal. But, crucially, the MCA was now able to press the cause of squatters and detainees.105 More controversially, some MCA representatives began to embed themselves in screening operations. They selected squatter representatives who would then become MCA representatives in their villages. In turn, the government tried to give special priority to the security of MCA areas.106 Some major figures in the MCA wanted to go further. Leong Yew Koh, a former colonel in the Chinese nationalist army, suggested that 10,000 men be recruited to Malaya from the Kuomintang armies in Taiwan or from those interned in northern Vietnam.107 Tan Cheng Lock rose in the esteem of the British, after their execration of him a year earlier for leading the united front. Gurney, Malcolm MacDonald recollected, had called him ‘gaga’ (Tan was sixty-six years of age). But now both men recognized Tan’s skill in bringing the various factions together and interceding for the community. At a meeting with Gurney at the beginning of April, Tan petitioned for some squatters at Kajang, south of Kuala Lumpur, as ‘good and blameless people’. Gurney asked him if he was leaving to return to Malacca that evening, and ‘he said no, he thought that it was too late in view of possible dangers on the road. I asked him where the dangers lay, he said “Kajang”. Let it be to his credit that he also laughed.’108 Within a few days, on 10 April, Tan Cheng Lock was seriously injured, along with the leader of the Perak mine owners, Cheong Chee, by a grenade attack on the Perak MCA office at the Ipoh Chinese Chamber of Commerce. Tan, the British reported, ‘displayed a brilliant sense of occasion, and some may even suspect that he has enjoyed himself immensely’. His journey back to Malacca was a triumphal progress. He was met at each stage with well-wishers and special escorts to protect him. He kept his bloodied shirt as a memento. But his health never recovered from the injury.109 This was one of several attacks on MCA targets; in December, at the funeral of the mother of Cheong Chee, another grenade killed three mourners and injured Lau Pak Khuan and Leong Yew Koh. They ‘knelt before the British bandits, wagging their tails to beg for pity…’, announced the MNLA: ‘shameless “country-selling” thieves. They are racial traitors.’110
But the British had now found a way to hurt the communists. As plans for the mass deportations of squatters looked like collapsing in late 1948, the government began to think in more radical terms: the resettlement en masse of the rural Chinese on the peninsula. A federal committee on squatters was set up in late 1948, and reported in January 1949. Approaching the issue more as one of efficient administration rather than security, it argued that squatters should be settled where they stood. This was a dramatic shift in policy: it proposed giving land wholesale to Chinese peasants for the first time. But the plan ran into a quagmire of opposition from the State governments, in whom control