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The first steps came at the end of 1948, with Onn’s return from London. Inspired by his attendance at the World Conference on Moral Rearmament, a well-connected Straits Chinese schoolteacher, Thio Chan Bee, attempted to apply its principles to inter-ethnic tensions in Malaya. This was not a new idea. Civic movements like Rotary and Kiwanis were taking root among the middle classes. Onn himself had encountered Moral Rearmament on a sojourn at the World Trade Fair in San Francisco in 1939, where he had run the Johore pavilion. The industrialist Lee Kong Chian had attended a Moral Rearmament conference in the United States on the recommendation of President Truman himself. It chimed too with recent speeches of Malcolm MacDonald, who agreed to act as honest broker. Thio Chan Bee used his offices to bring Onn and Tan Cheng Lock and their followings together for the first time. The meeting was carefully choreographed. Eleven Chinese leaders met beforehand at the Singapore Garden Club, where even the issue of whether Tan Cheng Lock should bring himself to thank the host for dinner was a matter for discussion. They then travelled to Onn’s residence in Johore Bahru, where many of the leading Malays of the south were gathered. Onn and MacDonald met them at the door. The meeting was tense: the leading Malayans were strangers to each other. Tan Cheng Lock broke the ice by reciting Malay pantuns, playful lyrical quatrains. The discussion then became open and frank. It hinged on a key issue: ‘The Chinese have economic power. The Malays now have political power. If the Chinese will help the Malays to rise economically, then surely the Malays must share with the Chinese their political power.’ The meeting was secret, but a more formal gathering was arranged at the wedding of a Malay notable in Penang in January. It was the first time that Malays had crossed the threshold of the Chinese Corner Club in Northam Road.138

The meetings continued for the rest of 1949, and into the following year. Those attending became known as the Communities Liaison Committee, and membership was broadened to include a Ceylonese lawyer, E. E. C. Thuraisingham. It had no official standing, nor were its proceedings ever made public, but it began a process whereby the core issues of state would be ironed out, in camera, by representatives of the two main ethnic communities.139 The first crucial meetings in 1949 were dominated by Malay resentment at the Chinese stranglehold on Asian commerce in Malaya. In a testy meeting in Kuala Lumpur in late February, the Chinese leaders sat through a strongly worded attack by the Perak leader of UMNO, Abdul Wahab. Historically, he argued, the Malays were well represented in the economy, but they had lost commercial control. He inveighed against ‘the use of strangulation methods’ by Chinese businesses: the lending of money to ‘infiltrate’ the economy; the use of syndicates to control prices, short weights and ‘systematic corruption’. ‘The Malays,’ he said, ‘who used to be a proud race, were forced to begging and the ultimate results of all this would be discontent, jealously and hatred.’ The response of Tan Cheng Lock was measured: ‘Not only the Malays are suffering,’ he said. ‘There are many Chinese suffering.’ But he enunciated a clear principle: ‘In the common interest of Malaya, it is of paramount importance that the non-Malays shall make every endeavour to co-operate amongst themselves and with the Malays to improve the economic position of the Malays so that they, the Malays, can take their rightful and proper place and share fully in the economic life of Malaya.’ The debate centred on quotas for the Malays in key sectors: transport for Malays to get their goods to market, and bus routes, a symbolic area where Malays had once been leading entrepreneurs, but had been dislodged since the war. This approach would have an enduring legacy for the post-colonial development of Malaya. It defined the ‘new paternalism’ of the elite: the combination of a bureaucratic and communal approach to economic