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alternatives. Liberalism never recovered from the shocking blows to civil society during these years of upheaval. The internationalist vision of the radicals evaporated. The post-independence elites saw it as a dangerous thing; it was, in Lee Kuan Yew’s striking phrase, ‘anti-national’. In this new atmosphere many of the great figures of the popular movements faced long periods of imprisonment, exile or exclusion. But the vanquished also were struck out of national narratives, and almost vanished from historical memory itself. For many of them the post-independence years were a long struggle to be heard; in the words of Ahmad Boestamam: ‘to give a true picture of how a path to the summit was cut and who were its pioneers, so that in time to come it will not be “the cow that gives the milk but the bull too that gets the credit”’.70 In Britain, much was also forgotten, not least the many horrors of the post-war campaigns in Malaya, Indonesia and Vietnam. In 2005 British veterans of the Emergency were refused permission from the British government to wear their campaign medal from the Malaysian government, the Pingat Jasa Malaysia, in recognition of their sacrifice in conflicts in which 519 British troops were killed.

In 1998, fifty years after the outbreak of the Malayan revolution, Chin Peng began a series of journeys. At this point his countrymen had seen only four images of him: at the victory parade in January 1946 when Louis Mountbatten pinned the Burma Star on his jungle fatigues; a grainy photograph on the poster that offered a quarter of million dollars for him, dead or alive; then there was Chin Peng at Baling, looking like a young clerk on his day off in baggy trousers and a short-sleeved shirt; then nothing for thirty-four years until he appeared at the Haadyai peace talks of 1989, an elderly man now, a little overweight, in a smart business suit, but entirely composed in the full glare of the world’s media. There, in fluent Malay, he had pledged allegiance to the King of Malaysia, and his deputy Abdullah C. D. urged Malaysians to unite in the cause of social justice. But in June 1998, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Emergency, Chin Peng appeared in London. This excited some comment in the British press, but was unreported in Malaysia, and the subject of only a short notice in the Singapore Straits Times. There he travelled to the Public Record Office at Kew; where, in a curious circumlocution of history, the insurgent entered the imperial archive. Surrounded by dozens of other visitors researching their family histories, Chin Peng began a paper trail through his own past. He took pencil notes from the newly opened files of Special Operations Executive; of missions of which he had been a part during the war; of the first agreements in the Malayan jungle between the Malayan Communist Party and South East Asia Command, signed by the traitor Lai Teck; and other names, other betrayals. It began a short odyssey of meetings and interviews with writers and scholars in London, Canberra and, eventually, even Singapore, many of them adversaries, retired policemen and soldiers. Some years later, with the heavy editorial hand of a retired correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, his memories would be woven into a memoir entitled My Side of History.

Even to his own followers Chin Peng was something of a myth. He had not been seen in the camps of the MCP since he had escaped overland to Beijing in 1960. In his absence, the party had fought a second Emergency, and continued to recruit in small numbers from the poverty and disillusions of independence. It had faced fissures and a brutal internal ‘cleansing’. Now small communities of aged fighters, their families and more recent arrivals lived in ‘friendship villages’ along the Malaysian border, established by the Thai government under the patronage of the Crown Princess. The remnants were still bound by a keen sense of the MCP’s history – the landmarks of its struggle celebrated in commemoration and song. In Hong Kong histories began to appear, in Chinese, of the resistance struggle