new relevance and the official vernacular embraced new terms such as ‘community development’ – a vague catch-all for a miscellany of initiatives in leadership training, by which, in the words of one official, the people were to be ‘suitably instructed towards their own emancipation’.23 A favoured keyword of Templer himself was ‘service’; it began with a scheme to make the police appear more friendly to the community, inspired, it was said, by the scene in The Wizard of Oz where a lion is made brave after receiving a medal for courage. Templer had been a keen Boy Scout, from which experience he seems to have drawn many of his ideas; his wife, Peggy, lent her patronage to the Women’s Institutes, in which elite wives brought their home skills to the New Villages and kampongs. Purcell felt ‘service’ to be a particularly pernicious substitute for the development of democratic institutions. All this entailed a massive expansion of government outside the counter-insurgency campaign; from local government and town-and-country planning to the electricity grid and the road network. This resulted in an infrastructure that few countries in Asia could match. It also created a strong – and potentially overbearing – state: the number of its employees grew from 48,000 in 1948 to 140,000 in 1959. Equally, the ravages of war and occupation were repaired to a degree that Burma never experienced. But the idea that ‘winning hearts and minds’ was a carefully prepared strategy is a myth. The classic manual was written – by Robert Thompson, an ex-Chindit, Chinese affairs officer and later secretary for defence in Malaya – only after the Emergency had ended.24 At the time the strategy was an ‘agglomeration of trifles’, and it proceeded mainly by trial and error. Many of the ‘after-care’ measures, as they were termed, arrived in fits and starts some time after the worst effects of resettlement – the uprooting, banishments, loss of income, exposure to corruption and exploitation – had already been experienced by rural Chinese. As the novelist Han Suyin wrote of a New Village in Johore, where she set her novel And the Rain my Drink…:
The dirt road was a new gash across the jungle. There, at the edge of a foetid mangrove swamp, between the thrusting mangrove spikes like a field of spears for miles… was the ‘New Village’, spreading itself into the swamp. Four hundred beings, including children, huddled there, foot deep in brackish mud. There were some ataphuts with zinc roofs, obviously brought from elsewhere. I shall never forgot the pale and puffy faces: beri-beri, or the ulcers on their legs. Their skin had the hue of the swamp.25
The routine harassment of women and men by strip-searching during the daily food searches as people left the village of Semenyih became a public scandal; the official report painted a picture of proud and individualistic cultivators, goaded by the daily indignity almost beyond endurance.26 The military still dealt in crude racial stereotypes, and Templer’s personal endorsement of a thinly disguised soldier’s fiction, Jungle Green, with its racist language, caused a storm among the Chinese community. The charge that the British were, at bottom, ‘playing the race card’ was never dispelled.27 But ‘hearts and minds’ was the subject of a carefully orchestrated campaign of press coverage, not least to offset the mounting criticism, and it began to attract international attention. Malaya would eventually become a textbook case, to be applied beyond its borders from Vietnam – where Thompson led a British advisory mission – and, into the twenty-first century, to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The British would take the credit for defeating communism in Malaya, but if the essence of ‘hearts and minds’ lay in creating a sense of security and confidence, that allowed people to pursue their livelihoods with reasonable freedom and in reasonable safety, and in the absence of intimidation, and so encourage them to identify with government initiatives, other factors were crucial. The British in Malaya were rescued by the economy. By 1951 the cost