Ecological narratives of forced resettlement in Cold War Malaya

ABSTRACT

This article examines the forced resettlement of more than 500,000 ethnic rural Chinese during the Malayan Emergency that lasted from 1948 until 1960. The phrase “winning the hearts and minds of the people” encapsulates the British narrative of economic uplift and development, evident from the naming of sites that rural Chinese were moved to as “New Villages.” This justification of Cold War counterinsurgency strategy through development is apparent in the British pamphlet, “The Story of Permatang Tinggi New Village,” which casts rural Chinese as a primitive people without history, transformed into productive and loyal citizens after resettlement. Yet, oral histories and cultural productions by resettled villagers challenge this, as seen in the essays and poetry of villager Wong Yoon Wah. Whereas the British presented rural Chinese as rootless squatters, Wong portrayed another world in which the longstanding Nanyang connection to the ecology of the tropics manifest in fish who live in ponds beside tin mines, and bats whose night time flights of pollination are upset by the chaos of the Emergency. His writings counteract “hearts and minds” by reclaiming the rural jungle in which they worked and lived as homelands lost to British resettlement.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecology
• resettlement
• Cold War
• Malaya
• colonialism

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Samuel Dolbee, Marla Andrea Ramirez, Alice Baumgartner, Jesse Howell, Sonia Gomez, Kathy Yim King Mak, David Der-wei Wang, and Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Zhou Hau Liew received his PhD in comparative literature and literary theory from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. He was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University from 2018 until 2019. His research focuses on Cold War ecologies and Sinophone cultures in Asia.

Notes

1 High Commissioner 1952, 193.

2 Sandhu 1973, xxix–lxv. Sandhu estimates the total number of rural people who were moved and resettled in this period to be more than a million. That figure includes “regroupment” policies which predominantly affected the Indian population, distinct from those who were resettled into the New Villages, which were eighty-six percent Chinese. According to Sandhu, “regroupment entailed the transfer of dispersed mine and estate laborers, their families and their dwellings, to some fortified point of concentration on the property of the employer or close to it” (xxxix).

3 Harper 1999, 142; Loh 1988, 111–112. Francis Loh gives the example of Emergency Regulations 17D, 17E, and 17F in 1949, which legalized the detention, eviction, and regroupment of rural land occupants by both federal and state governments in Malaya.

4 Hack 2013; 21–22.

5 Hack 2013, 36–37. The “Min Yuen,” or the “Masses Organization” was a civilian network sympathetic to the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Its role included organizing support among the rural people.

6 Sandhu 1973, lxi.

7 Stubbs 1989, 1–9.

8 Stubbs 1989, 246–264; Harper 1999, 84–86; Hack 2013; 29–30.

9 Stubbs 1989, 264.

10 Hack 2013; Liew 2018. Liew Chin Tong, the former Deputy Minister of Defense of Malaysia, has written: “It is vital that we do not ignore the relevant political aspects involved when we consider measures to counter terrorism. The Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) offers us the lesson that defeating terrorism is about winning hearts and minds.” Hack, on the contrary, notes that: “ … Malaya was quickly adopted as a classic case study in how to defeat insurgency through ‘winning hearts and minds.’ The resulting misconceptions have influenced the debate and practice of counterinsurgency (COIN) from Vietnam to Afghanistan” (18).

11 Tan 2012, 84–119.

12 Fiction examples include Tiang 2017. For documentaries, see Lau 2016 and Wong 2009.

13 McGregor 2016. An example is Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad's The Last Communist (2006), which, McGregor writes, “traced the life journey of [Malayan Communist Party leader] Chin Peng through a survey of places that he had visited or which had been important to the MCP. The film … includes no images of Chin Peng, yet it was banned … the second film, Village People Radio Show (Apa Khabar Orang Kampung), focusing on Malay soldiers who fought with the MCP and settled in Southern Thailand, was also banned … the Malaysian government strongly resisted Chin Peng's attempted rehabilitation, initially seizing copies of Chin Peng's memoir in raids on bookshops” (251). Recently Lau Kek Huat's Absent Without Leave (2016), which details Lau's search for his grandfather's past as an MCP member and Lau's childhood in a New Village was banned by Malaysian film censors. The Ministry of Home Affairs houses the Film Censorship Board, and laws such as the 2002 Film Censorship Act require that all local and foreign films publicly screened be approved by the board. The 1984 Printing Presses and Publications Act controls the publication and distribution of publications in Malaysia.

14 Bernards 2015, 15.

15 Heidhues 1996; Tan 2012.

16 Mackie 1996, xxiv.

17 Harper 1999, 180.

18 Heidhues 1996; Morris 2007, 159–194; Loh 1988. Heidhues notes that the Chinese did not fit the British template of “native rights to land,” and “in plantation areas, first choice went to European enterprises” (179). Morris elaborates on this by examining a colonial worldview that portrayed Malay rurality and land ownership as authentic, as opposed to other non-Malay groups, including the Chinese, Indians, and semi-nomadic Orang Asli. She argues that British officials in Malaya romanticized the pastoral, conjured corresponding ideas of authentic Malay rurality, and enacted laws such as the Malay Lands Act of 1913 to reflect this.

19 Loh 1988, 39.

20 Loh 1988, 60; Harper 1999, 97.

21 Harper 1999, 96. Harper suggests that the agricultural methods of the settlers were a problem for the environment, especially during a time when food supplies were low throughout Malaya.

22 Harper 1999, 97.

23 Harper 1999, 174; Loh 1988, 108–111. Harper and Loh give differing accounts of how the recommendations of the Squatter Committee of 1949 were ultimately rejected by some of the Malay States, which had the final say on land issues.

24 Loh 1988, 110.

25 Harper 1999, 106. This anxiety about the future was one of the reasons for solidarity between disparate rural Chinese cultivators, some of whom segued into support for the Malayan Communist Party, which heavily recruited in these places.

26 High Commissioner 1952, 193; Atkinson 1953.

27 Smith 1964, 174–186.

28 Atkinson 1953.

29 King 1954, 33–40.

30 Barber 1971 is an archetypal narrative, delivered in the form of popular history.

31 Ross 1953.

32 Laycock 1953, 2.

33 Laycock 1953, 5.

34 Literally: “在现代的思想战争中, 这只是该村历史的再造罢了.” In the English-language version of the pamphlet, this incident is rendered as “a prologue to the village's history.”

35 Sackley 2011, 497.

36 Forth 2017, 12; Sackley 2011, 483.

37 Sackley 2011, 485.

38 Laycock 1953, 4.

39 Federal Executive Council 1952, 76: “A new mode of life for the people who dwell in them … it is imperative that this new life should, after the initial disturbance of moving, be more attractive than the old … the foundations of a better life in the new villages will be not only freedom from fear but also water supplies and sanitation, schools and dispensaries, the growth of civic sensibility and pride in communal as well as individual achievements.”

40 Laycock 1953, 4. Interestingly, this description of primitiveness is not found in the Chinese version of the text.

41 Laycock 1953,8.

42 Laycock 1953, 6: “ … it is a fresh world this new Permatang Tinggi that grows like a Phoenix alongside the rubble of the old village of intimidation and death.”

43 Laycock 1953 16.

44 Laycock 1953, 18.

45 Hack 1999, 100–101; Stubbs 1989, 1–9. According to Stubbs, the term “hearts and minds” was coined by Gerald Templer.

46 Hack 2013, 19.

47 Tan 2009, 221.

48 Laycock 1953, 8; 19.

49 Laycock 1953, 2.

50 Neill 1950: “ … there is always present that indescribable fear of an unknown fate inherent in the Chinese people, which will strike out and cut down he who divulges evil. For centuries Chinese secret societies have played havoc with this outlook, and what is Malayan banditry to the average Chinese family man uneducated in Malayan–British ideals, but a cantankerous form of secret society, and to many a young Chinese tapper, a glamourous struggle comparable with the best adventure stories of the Three Kingdoms?” (4).

51 Laycock 1953, 7–8.

52 Wong's writings are part of a small corpus of works available in English which deal with the legacy of the British resettlement policies from the perspectives of Chinese in Malaya. The most well-known of these in the Anglophone world is Han Suyin's And the Rain My Drink (1956) which portrays resettlement in Johor. More recent publications include Jeremy Tiang's State of Emergency (2017). While many accounts on this subject have been published in Chinese, only Ng Kim Chew's Slow Boat to China and Other Stories (2016), a collection of short stories, and Yeng Pway Ngon's Unrest (2018), a novel, have been translated into English.

53 Wong 2016, 6.

54 Durians is a translated compilation of essays from various sources, including 重返集 [The Return] (2010), and 南洋乡土集 [The Nanyang Homeland] (1981). The original Chinese version of New Village was published in 1999 as 热带雨林与殖民地 [The Tropical Rainforest and the Colony].

55 Wong 2013, 940.

56 Wong 2013, 940.

57 Wong 2013, 906.

58 Wong 2013, 952.

59 Wong 2013, 964.

60 Wong 2013, 964.

61 Wong 2013, 988; 976.

62 Wong 2013, 1071.

63 Wong 2013, 1086; 1108. Wong makes the point that this fish “has emerged as the only form of animal meat acceptable to every group.” He points out that “freshwater fish … helps to bridge the boundaries between religious communities” – it is a symbol of an “intermingling.”

64 Wong 2013, 1139.

65 Wong 2013,1150.

66 Wong 2013, 1142–1148.

67 Wong 2013, 1150.

68 Wong 2013, 1186.

69 Wong 2013, 1173.

70 Wong 2013, 1205.

71 Wong was a student in Taiwan during the 1960s.

72 Wong gives the example of a bridge built in 2002 in his home state of Johor, which incorporated fern motifs.

73 Wong 2013; 1253–1255.

74 Wong 2013, 1267–1269: “In the city, they hang on a string, bunch after bunch in midair, looking as if they’ve grown off a washing line, blowing in the wind. This attractive image is a totem of the indigenous culture.”

75 Wong 2013, 1618.

76 Wong 2013; 1528–1530.

77 Wong 2013; 1528–1530.

78 Wong 2013, 1765.

79 Wong 2013, 1536.

80 Wong 2013, 1546.

81 Wong 2013, 1595.

82 Ross 2017, 120–129.

83 Wong 2013, 1842.

84 Wong 2013; 2442–2444.

85 Wong 2013, 2424.

86 Hack 1999, 104. Hack notes that resettlement was largely financed by rubber exports from Malaya, as rubber prices rose due to stockpiling during the Korean War in 1950 and 1951.

87 Wong 2013, 1642. The rain tree, or yu lin, refers to the rainforest, the oldest trees of the tropics.

88 Wong 2013, 1755.

89 Wong 2013, 1647.

90 Another term used by the British to refer to the communist guerrillas, which Wong quotes in his poems.

91 Wong 1999, 13.

92 Wong 2012, 160.

93 Wong 2012, 160.

94 Wong 2012, 160–161.

95 紧急法令.

96 Wong 2012, 178.