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high tide’ that would bring in its wake the birth of a ‘New Age’. This mood of expectation was taken up by the press with unprecedented freedom. Apart from Japanese propaganda in English and Malay newspapers, the war years were a period of complete isolation and silence. News in Chinese vanished entirely. But in the months after the surrender there was a rush of information from outside that gave local events an almost apocalyptic ring. Although newsprint was in short supply, old newspapers revived quickly with small print runs and the MCP was able to invest in its first mouthpieces: in Singapore the New Democracy and in Kuala Lumpur the Min Sheng Pau – The People’s Voice – the editor of which was Liew Yit Fan, a English-educated Jamaican-born Eurasian Chinese and one of the Party’s most able cadres. Even the older towkay-backed Chinese newspapers, such as Nanyang Siang Pau and the Sin Chew Jit Poh, had editors who were active in the resistance movement, and gave significant coverage to the left. The New Democratic Youth League churned out pamphlets – Victor Gollancz of London was the universal model – ranging from catechisms for the MCP to a best-selling self-help book (How to treat people). Literary periodicals revived, stimulated by the poetic offerings of MPAJA veterans, in the mode according to one British reader, of ‘reminiscences under a sombre sky, then the eternal “running dogs” of the Japanese’.84 Writers celebrated the lack of censorship by launching a kind of guerrilla journalism against the BMA. This was duly translated daily by the government PR department for the military to read. They were incensed at the public ridicule. Papers countered with teasing apologies: ‘We are surprised at your Honours being offended by our remark that your Honour is oppressive, cruel, unjust and insincere, and we hope that your Honour will forgive our ignorance.’85 The soldiers were not amused.

Not only the British were alarmed at the headway the communists had made, so too as they began to resurface were Chinese businessmen, most of whom were instinctive supporters of the rival Kuomintang. The nationalists’ few Force 136 fighters were marginalized by both the British and the MPAJA. The Kuomintang attempted to set up its own youth groups and make its presence felt. Senior nationalist leaders, businessmen and opinion-makers began to drift back from exile. The one man whose moral authority transcended the political cleavages among the Overseas Chinese was Tan Kah Kee. On 6 October, he returned to Singapore from Java, where – as Japan’s Public Enemy No. 1 – he had spent the war in hiding. In the traditional manner, a party was given the next evening to greet him in his old residence, the ‘millionaires club’, the Ee Hoe Hean. At seventy-one years of age, Tan Kah Kee was now a great patriarch. Victor Purcell attended the gathering; the spectrum of guests, he noted, was ‘unprecedented’: there was a full turn-out of dignitaries from the various Chinese clan and commercial associations over which Tan Kah Kee had once held sway, but the guests now included Wu Tian Wang and Lee Kiu, as representatives of the Malayan Communist Party. Tan Kah Kee made a speech criticizing the low price of rubber and made a plea for the abolition of opium and cabarets, his old bugbears. Surveying the crowd, Purcell speculated that Tan Kah Kee could well turn out to be ‘the George Washington of a Nanyang Chinese independence movement’. But Purcell also noted that, although Tan Kah Kee’s anti-Japanese credentials were unimpeachable, he was in very many ways out of touch with local conditions. His theme, Purcell recorded, remained ‘the drawing off of Malayan wealth for China’ and ‘Malaya for the Chinese’. In the propaganda of the communists, Purcell observed, ‘there is no mention of any one race’. The Party was beginning to turn away from its core Chinese support base and becoming more ‘Malayan’ in its outlook. But, at the same time, its peaceful co-existence with the British was coming rapidly to an end. As the meeting to welcome Tan Kah Kee drew to a close,