Forgotten Wars_ Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia - Christopher Bayly [314]
of maintaining and operating forces was £48.5m. The extra cost to the federal government was £13.8m and its total costs came to £29m out of a budget of £66m.28 This was a crippling burden, and it was entirely fortuitous that the British were able to meet it through the windfall of the Korean War boom in Malaya’s raw materials. This was a time of relative prosperity for some. Little of it was enjoyed by labourers; wage increases were absorbed by price inflation and undercut by the recession that followed the boom. The chronic poverty in which communism flourished diminished only slightly. But above all, Asian business revived. The profits of Chinese towkays were increasingly reinvested in Malaya, in rubber estates and in shares in locally registered companies. The leading Chinese bank, the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, was on a par with the European concerns and held two-thirds of the total deposits of Chinese banks in Malaya. Tan Cheng Lock was a director both of OCBC and of the colonial concern Sime Derby.29 This was important because much of the burden of counter-insurgency – for relief and after-care – fell on Malayans, and the decisive shifts in the conflict came within Malayan society itself. This was chiefly the process whereby the Chinese consolidated their stake in the country and the Chinese leadership, now gathered together in the Malayan Chinese Association, consolidated its grip on the community. In this the British, of course, played a role; in encouraging Chinese enlistment in the police, in the vital struggle to give land title to resettled farmers. But often the British were bystanders.30 Obscure battles for control in the New Villages, or over village councils or in the Chinese schools, became key. The resources of the Chinese community were gradually amassed behind the government. In Perak the Kuomintang guerrillas were mobilized into a Kinta Home Guard. The Emergency was also fought by Malay officials as they sought to recover their authority in troubled Malay kampongs. But Malay wrath at the administrative attention showered on the erstwhile supporters of the communists was only partially assuaged by the expansion of rural health services and development funds. Malay policemen continued to bear the brunt of the casualties and they particularly resented another key aspect of the strategy: the rewards – sometimes thousands of dollars – paid to surrendered guerrillas who turned coat and informed on their comrades. ‘Why should they risk their necks to help the [surrendered communists] get rewards greater than anything they were ever likely to come by?’31 It was a battle to reconstruct communities, and for the elite to restore the networks and patron–client relationships that had been so damaged in the Japanese occupation. This was done increasingly on an ethnic basis. Above all, the fate of the rebellion in Malaya was decided by the continuing rapprochement between Malay administrative power and Chinese economic muscle.
Independence in Malaya was won by the alliance of conservatively inclined ethnic-based parties that had begun to form through the Communities Liaison Committee in 1949. The British still believed that something more was needed; a more authentic ‘united Malayan nation’ in Templer’s brief – and they still pinned their hopes on Dato Onn bin Jaafar to create it, although Lyttelton was less enamoured by him than were his predecessors. In 1950 and again in 1951, Onn argued that UMNO should open its doors to non-Malays. He was ultimately rejected by his party, and amid much lamenting stepped down as leader. He launched an Independence for Malaya Party the same year, with the backing of Tan Cheng Lock and other liberal Chinese. The idea behind it was that it would present a unified front for independence, and that the ethnic parties would dwindle into welfare bodies. MacDonald and Gurney had high hopes for it. But Onn’s refusal to embrace the cause of immediate independence, his insistence that the Malays still needed colonial protection, did not win over popular Malay opinion, nor that of