Legacies of the Cold War in Malaysia: Anything but Communism

ABSTRACT

Malaya’s anti-communist Emergency of 1948–1960 demonstrated the lengths to which elites – first British colonial, then local – were prepared to go to combat communism’s advance domestically. But the threat of communism, then the spectre of an all-too-convenient communist bogey, resonated across the polity well beyond the Malayan Communist Party’s defeat. The Cold War left a complex and enduring legacy for Malaysian formal politics and civil society. We can see these legacies in terms of political ideologies, settlement patterns, restrictive legislation and geo-political positioning. Overall, Malaysia did experience a genuine and aggressive communist movement, and its counterinsurgency measures, coupling a hearts-and-minds strategy with military suppression, remain a model for even present-day efforts against extremist mobilisation. But what has left a deeper stain is less the Malayan Communist Party per se than how these battles sculpted the ideological, demographic, legal and security landscape: a largely Chinese, internationally vilified, anti-capitalist movement at a formative period in Malaysian socio-political development helped to delegitimise ideological alternatives and bolster a strong, centralised, specifically communal and capitalist state, nested in a significantly depoliticised society.

KEYWORDS:

• Malaysia
• Cold War
• anti-communism
• colonial legacies
• ethnic politics

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the journal’s anonymous reviewers and to participants in the May 2018 workshop at Stockholm University at which this special issue developed – particularly Kevin Hewison, Erik Mobrand, Heonik Kwon and Mary Callahan – for their suggestions and corrections.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Stockwell (2009, 282) does see, though, effects of both the 1960 collapse of the Russo-Chinese alliance and the onset of China’s Cultural Revolution in devastating rifts and purges that wracked the MCP. Hack (2009, 479) goes further with this “post-revisionist” reading, tracing the extent to which shifts in the “communist international line” did help to structure and spark local revolts across Asia, including “the shift to more violent tactics” in Malaya (Hack 2009, 482).

2. Today’s Malaysia and Singapore include what were a cluster of colonial entities – the Federated Malay States (FMS) and Unfederated Malay States (UMS) on the peninsula; the insular Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Malacca; and British North Borneo (now Sabah) and the “White Raja” Brooke family-ruled Sarawak on the island of Borneo. The FMS, UMS, Malacca, and Penang initially formed independent Malaya in 1957; Singapore, Sabah, and Sarawak joined in 1963, forming Malaysia; then Singapore left in 1965.

3. See Blackburn and Hack (2012) on the elevation of a Malay-centric narrative as the state’s master narrative, and the segregation of other communities’ memories and commemorations.

4. On the salience, structure and implications of Chinese education, see, among others, Enloe (1970); Tan, L. (1988, 1997); Heng (1996); and Ang (2014).

5. On the development of trade unions, see especially Dass (1991) and Stenson (1970, 1980). Information here is drawn from these sources.

6. In Singapore alone, in 1961 – that is, the end of the Malayan Emergency – strikes still accounted for 400,000 worker-days lost (Bellows 1970, 112).

7. English-educated Chinese were not above suspicion, though: a post-war Chinese-school-based Anti-British League (ABL), for instance, was found in 1951 to have a cell at the University of Malaya. Colonial officials detained 14 university students and employees, among others. The ABL’s English-speaking segment fed into a small English-speaking branch of the MCP (Weiss 2011, 66–67).

8. The MCP had sat earlier for negotiations with the incoming Malayan and Singaporean governments – the MCP’s Chin Peng and Abdul Rashid Maidin on the one side; Singapore’s David Marshall and Malaya’s Tunku Abdul Rahman and Tan Cheng Lock on the other, at Baling, Perak in 1955 – but the talks came to nothing.

9. Monthly Federation of Malaya political and intelligence reports throughout the 1950s, as well as other colonial-era documents, indicate that British intelligence homed in closely on Chinese schools across Singapore and Malaya – which may be moderately multi-ethnic today, but were not then – as presumed hives of communists, for instance. See also (Ngoei, 2019).

10. Prominent and persecuted left-wing activist Poh Soo Kai, for instance, begins his memoir (Poh 2016) with the story of his towkay grandfather’s far-reaching philanthropy in China, where he was born, and the latter’s eventual support for the Chinese communist regime.

11. It is widely acknowledged that the Strategic Hamlet Program used in Vietnam built on ideas from this programme in the Malayan Emergency. In 1961, Sir Robert Thompson, a member of the staff of the British director of operations during the Emergency and later Permanent Secretary of Defence in Malaya, was the head of the British Advisory Mission to South Vietnam when he proposed a plan for pacification of the Mekong Delta to South Vietnam’s President Diem. The programme was soon accepted by US advisors and administration (see Department of Defense n.d., 10–16).

12. Yao (2016) offers an especially cogent description and assessment of the extent and nature of coercion (for instance, the use of collective punishment) and resistance in New Villages. For a fictionalised account by an Emergency-era police officer of British Special Branch subjugation of Chinese villagers in the course of pursuing communists, see Lilley (1970).

13. In a perverse twist, the MCA and the BN campaigned in 2018’s general elections in part specifically on their proximity to China, to the point of featuring Chinese President Xi Jinping together with MCA President Liow Tiong Lai on billboards (Straits Times, April 29, 2018).

14. Following General Suharto’s seizure of power and anti-communist pogrom, Konfrontasi clashes declined and an end to the conflict was declared. On events in Indonesia, see Törnquist (2020).