• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4314 0

observed, ‘you find the Japanese notes everywhere – along the roadside, five-foot ways, people just throw them away.’35 A petition to the government described the resulting hysteria: ‘Many civilians have registered their names with the lunatic asylum, commit suicide and daylight robbery due to the non-recognition.’36 The Malayan Communist Party was reported to have lost most of its funds. Mountbatten was furious: the policy was, he said, ‘un-British and disastrous to our reputation for fair play’.37 The British put Straits dollars into circulation by issuing cash relief and advances on salaries, and a surprising amount of pre-war money came out of holes in the ground. The transience of wealth was inseparable in the popular imagination with the proliferation of open gambling in the streets. But a more abiding legacy was a lingering suspicion of paper money, particularly among peasants who were reluctant to part with their rice crops for cash at the low official prices; they bartered or put it on the black market. Weimar-proportion price inflation resulted: rice was now at thirty to forty times its pre-war price, and banana and sweet potato skins were sold as staples in the markets.

The black economy eclipsed the old colonial economy almost entirely. It was a parallel world that reached from maritime trade to industrial production on the forest frontier. Quiet tropical islands such as Karimun, just southwest of Singapore, suddenly became chaotic ‘free ports’ for the smugglers’ trade from Thailand, Sumatra and Java. Pirates staged audacious raids on Penang island. Taking advantage of the liberal policy towards societies, the Ang Bin Hoay brotherhood united the notorious gangs of Penang and, by the end of the year, mass initiation ceremonies – involving hundreds at a time – were held in the Relau hills. Lorries cruised through the streets of George Town, picking up men with cries of ‘This way for the Show!’ and ‘Any more for the hills?’38 During the BMA period, 600 murders were reported and 470 instances of gang robbery, as against thirteen in 1939. Before the war the British had governed this volatile world at a distance. Labour had been controlled principally by employers and contractors. But the European managers had disappeared and many Chinese industrialists fled abroad. Those who remained had found it difficult to refuse to join Japanese-sponsored community organizations, and now carried the stain of collaboration. They lost considerable prestige; some retired from public life altogether, or had to struggle to regain their standing in the community. The power of the towkays was weakest in the countryside, where, for a time, the rule of the bosses was broken.

The production of strategic commodities such as rubber, tin and timber was taken over by the informal economy. Rubber was collected on a ‘self-tap, self-sell’ basis. An everyday sight around mining pools was large numbers of women panning for ore, a process known as dulang washing. There were violent confrontations when the police tried to stop it. Gangs of ‘democratic workmen’ elected their own bosses and demanded logging rights. Chinese peasants moved onto disused plantation land or forest reserve. The first British visitors to reach these areas were grudgingly impressed. ‘Although these people may be given to gang robbery’, a forester wrote in his diary, ‘they are nevertheless remarkably good gardeners.’39 Townsfolk were almost entirely dependent on their terraces of vegetables and tobacco. Many labour and forest departments and district and land offices had ceased to function. But to the British these people were illegal ‘squatters’, and as order slowly returned they came into conflict with the colonial regime and European rubber planters. Foresters were ‘constantly being threatened with calamity’, and in October two were killed trying to prevent some Chinese from felling timber.40 For the first time the squatters – slash-and-burn farmers, freewheeling tappers and loggers, ‘wild rat’ miners and charcoal burners, illicit distillers and wild-game hunters – had