policy disadvantaged Malay families who – through cultural pride or, more often, lack of choice – did not send their children to English-language schools. This point was driven home by ‘C. H. E. Det’, the future prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, who was now a medical student, in his newspaper column, and it later became an argument for mandatory Malay ‘quotas’ in higher education. The Chinese-educated remained unreconciled to colonial curricula. However, radical students such as James Puthucheary kept alive contacts with Malay intellectuals. The principal channel for this after 1948 was the newspaper Utusan Melayu, which remained the vanguard of Malay anti-colonial opinion. Its editor, A. Samad Ismail, never placed himself in the foreground of Malay radicalism, but was at the centre of a network of correspondents from upcountry towns, and a web of cosmopolitan friendships. These began to include the new generation of activists from the Chinese schools and trade unions. The coming man was Lim Chin Siong. In 1949, aged sixteen, after a childhood spent mostly in rural Johore, he entered Tan Kah Kee’s foundation, the Chinese High School in Singapore. Within two years he would take the lead in student protests and be expelled for subversion. With a personal mythology grounded in the patriotic resistance to Japan, a trenchant anti-colonialism and a charismatic oratory rooted in the demotic Hokkien dialect of the urban working class, Lim Chin Siong would come to personify the politics of this new generation. He led popular campaigns in defence of Chinese culture, and against registration for national service (‘Listen friends, only dogs have licences and numbers’). The British dismissed these student activists as Chinese ‘chauvinists’, but Lim Chin Siong also won the respect and trust of the Malay left for his advocacy of Malay as a national language rather than English. ‘He appeared in the sky of history’, eulogized the Malay ‘people’s laureate’, Usman Awang, ‘as a shining star in the sky of time.’156 The united front had dissolved, but its trans-ethnic patriotic vision was never lost, or wholly defeated.
The underground remnants of the Singapore Town Committee of the Malayan Communist Party tried to reconnect to this world. Under Ah Chin, the son of a Penang hawker, it was in tenuous contact by dead-letter boxes and couriers with the Party leadership in south Malaya, and was ordered to undertake acts of sabotage and arson to create economic chaos and tie up British resources. A young woman from a wealthy Perak family, Ah Har, was given responsibility for re-establishing links with the intellectuals. Only three of the Malayan Democratic Union leaders had taken to the jungle in late June 1948. Many of the older members, such as Philip Hoalim, repudiated the movement, but others remained sympathetic to the MCP’s claims to be at the forefront of national struggle. The key figure was thirty-year-old Eu Chooi Yip, who took a leading role in the formation of an ‘Anti-British League’. He was one of the most able activists of his time: Tan Cheng Lock had even invited him to be the organizing secretary of the Malayan Chinese Association. Eu Chooi Yip began to recruit from Malayan Democratic Union members, many of whom were already steeped in socialism, and to lead them to Marxism. Two important recruits to the Anti-British League were P. V. Sharma, a Brahmin schoolteacher who had championed the employment rights of Asian educators in relation to their expatriate counterparts, and John Eber. After the climactic events of May 1948 Eber had taken a eight-month holiday in Australia and New Zealand; when he returned he continued to lobby the Colonial Office for immediate self-government but, convinced that the British saw independence as far distant, he too threw in his lot with the Anti-British League. From a loft in Eber’s house Eu Chooi Yip produced Freedom News, perhaps the most sophisticated propaganda mouthpiece of the MCP. The League made inroads into the University of Malaya, and even among junior civil servants. In the Chinese schools