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somewhat perplexed, but ‘energetic, indomitable’.77 Wu Tian Wang and Lee Kiu put Britain’s ‘democratic’ policy on trial by repeatedly testing the extent of recognition the British were prepared to give the MCP. Lee Kiu outmanoeuvred the churches and charities to bring a substantial part of the relief work of the BMA in Singapore under the aegis of the MPAJA; by late September eight of its eighteen relief centres were run by the resistance organization, and the British officer who worked most closely with her praised her highly.78 These were some of the first direct encounters between senior colonial mandarins and the new Asian revolution. These autodidactic young Marxists were at a long remove from the new ‘Malayan’ leadership that men like Purcell were hoping to promote, and so too was their vision of democracy.

In the jungle, a book widely read by Communist Party leaders was Mao Zedong’s 1939 tract On New Democracy. It spoke of two stages of revolution: the first demanded a broad alliance across society before the second, full communist revolution, could be accomplished. It was a product of Mao’s need, in his base areas in the border regions in China, to consolidate his political control with policies that would appeal across a diverse social landscape. In Malaya the MCP had not seized the moment to create their Yenan, but, by analogy, New Democracy seemed well-tempered to Malaya’s plural society.79 The vanguard of New Democracy was the generation that had come to consciousness during the war, young people who had perhaps been too young to serve in the MPAJA, but were in awe of its patriotic mystique. The MCP targeted school students, many of whom, because of the closure of the Chinese middle schools, were now re-enrolling as young adults, experienced well beyond their years. Successive British governors were severely taxed by having to explain to ministers why their colony seemed to be continually under threat from schoolchildren. The Party’s principal open organization, the New Democratic Youth League, absorbed a giddying panoply of groups into its ranks: the Penang branch included propaganda, singing and theatrical parties, school unions, basketball and volleyball clubs, hairdressers and barbers, coffee-shop keepers and lion dance troupes.80

New Democracy for the first time brought young women leaders to the fore. Chin Peng’s comrade, Eng Ming Chin, became the leading light of the movement in Perak, and Lee Kiu led a Chinese women’s organization in Singapore which, by the end of the year, claimed 20,000 members. The war had made women more visible in the labour force and in trade; it had taken them out of the home. This was not always to their benefit, but it had shown their resilience and exposed their oppression. The experience of ‘comfort women’ and prostitutes was a spur to organization among women of all communities. One of the first resolutions of the MPAJA’s Johore People’s Assembly contained demands for women’s equal rights to inheritance, to equal wages and crèches in the workplace, and for an end to polygamy, prostitution and the keeping of ‘slave-girls’.81 Many Chinese women were attracted to the Communist Party by this preaching of an end to feudalism. For them, this meant a rejection of patriarchal Confucian thought. Party life could be an escape from oppressive households or bad marriages, and it often split families. Above all, perhaps, it was seen as a road to self-development. The MPAJA had shown itself willing to arm women as fighters.82 One Perak newspaper caught the mood: ‘Now Spring had returned to the world we must go hand in hand to unite together, no matter whether we are mistresses or paid-servants, or nonya [Straits Chinese matrons] or labourers or dulang-washers…’83

The MCP built support by tapping into the anarchical self-help of the occupation years, and by making it heroic. By all accounts its success was dramatic and this, for a time, seemed to vindicate Lai Teck. There was a sense that the organization was caught in the full, unstoppable flood of history; in Lai Teck’s words, a ‘revolutionary