WHAT'S WRONG IN MALAYA
By SIR RICHARD WINSTEDT
TN spite of a military offensive by Gurkhas and the accurate bomb- ing of jungle camps whose nefarious inmates were elsewhere, a wave of terrorism still surges round the villages, mines and estates of Malaya. What are the causes of this lawlessness ? When will the murder, robbery and arson be suppressed ? Who among the many peoples inhabiting the peninsula are responsible for the widespread outrages ? These are questions that puzzle the man in the Strand and, for that matter, the Member of Parliament.
To trace the origin of Malaya's social upset the first task is to discover which race and class are responsible. And the returns of the census held last year show that, apart from Malays and Chinese, other races to be found in the Federation are negligible. True, there are about three-quarters of a million Indians. But 44 per cent. of the population is Malay (2,395,125) and 38.6 per cent. Chinese. It is highly significant that of those Chinese two-thirds were born in China. It is also to be remembered that during the British period the only civil trouble that has ever disturbed the Malayan scene has been due to Chinese secret societies, of whose members as many as 4,000 killed one another as far back as 1854 in pitched battles which lasted ten days. It must further be recognised that long before the World War there were Chinese Communists in prosperous Malaya. They were never Chinese of local birth—nor are they today. Often they were teachers in Chinese vernacular schools who fiercely resented the intrusion of British education officers, except when their aid was needed to handle pupils whose absorption of ideas subversive of authority had led them to lock up their instructors and turn the key on discipline. But in those days the administration of Malaya was in the hands of men experienced in the psychology of its various races, hands neither unnerved by any world cataclysm nor weakened by untried and alien ideologies from Whitehall. Undesir- able aliens were banished as even nowadays they are banished from Great Britain.
Today there are still a few Malay and Indonesian (videlicet foreign Malay) Communists, though they do not think of treading the path of violence. A few Indian Communists, too, may be suspected of mischief-making, to judge from recent legislation authorising the banishmen even of British-born persons. The gunmen now terrorising Malaya's villages, mines and estates are all of them Chinese from China. Many are members of the Lui Tong Tai or Strong Arm section of the Chinese Communist Party, who during the Japanese occupation fled for their lives to the recesses of the forest-clad mountains. They boasted of being soldiers, but though they were well supplied with British arms and ammunition, their guerrilla activities never went beyond petty ambuscades, the sniping of patrols and brutal raids for food on unarmed Malay villagers. From outrages on a wider scale they were still deterred by fear of Japanese vengeance, nor perhaps were they disposed during the war to butcher and rob fellow countrymen, even if they were rated supporters of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. But no sooner was the war over than this rabble claimed to be heroes.of a resistance movement, deserving honour and special consideration as saviours of Malaya. They were, moreover, astonished and disappointed that the Japanese had to surrender not to a Chinese or a Russian army but to the British, whose flight and humiliation were indelible memories, affecting their perspective and judgement. For it must not be overlooked that this riff-raff is made up of juvenile miscreants not out of their teens, conceited, abysmally ignorant and open to the cajoleries of the most blatant and unscrupulous propaganda. Few of them can have completed even the most elementary education or have had opportunity to learn a trade or have been forced by the necessities of peace to submit to manual labour. And though Com- munist slogans have intoxicated these modern youths, it would be a mistake to forget that their fathers too served, many of them in the rabble forces of some Chinese war-lord and were not prevented by ignorance of Leninism from being adepts at murder, intimidation and robbery.
The activities of those pioneers of Chinese disorder were, however, confined to their homeland ; in a British protectorate
they did not venture to flout authority openly or on a formidable scale, even if party passions reduced them occasionally into faction fights among themselves. Their sons are subject to no such qualms or inhibitions, partly because they do not entertain their fathers' respect for British might, partly because they have been supplied with British grenades and cartridges, partly because political partisan- ship in modern China is bitter and nation-wide and partly because they are inspired by the lustful greed and misanthropy of Com- munism. The proportion of each of these ingredients in Malaya's present hell-broth is disputable. In a recent broadcast the Governor- General (who apparently is not allowed to govern) stressed the likelihood of international Communism being behind "the desperate efforts to impose the rule of gun and knife in plantations, mines and factories." And out of fifty Chinese agitators arrested lately in Siam twenty were teachers recently come from Shanghai and other Chinese ports and some of them from Burma. But in an interesting leader the Straits Times analysed the crimes of violence perpetrated in Malaya during the first half of June and pointed out how when guns were drawn in a Singapore factory it was because of a feud between Hokkiens and Hylams, who differ in blood and speech ; how two Chinese miners were murdered in order to terrorise their comrades to continue a moribund strike ; how many Chinese are butchered for being officials of the Kuomintang and how a British planter was done to death during the enactment of an ordinary squalid robbery of coolies' pay. In all these cases and in most of those more recent, there were a number of different and immediate causes, even if the general irruption of Communism was one factor.
Mr. Gallacher in the Commons and Left-wing bodies in Malaya would ascribe the epidemic of violence to labour unrest. Un- doubtedly the scarcity and prohibitive cost of rice, Malaya's staple food, upset labour after the eviction of the Japanese. But the Malayan Indian Congress, at any rate, is convinced that industrial discontent is not the cause of the criminal outrages, and it has claimed that no gunman has been an official or even a member of any trade union. When that view was expressed it was in defence of the liberty of trade unionism, but it could be supported by figures to show there were then only twenty-three strikes within the borders of the Federation, involving only 4,300 labourers. Those figures are not startling. But the local developments of trade unionism have not appeared harmless even to a Government which, undismayed by the social ferment in Malaya at the end of the war, relentlessly poured the new wine of Europe's trade unionism into the old bottles of the Chinese kongsi or guild. So that, now, to block channels of easy communication for Communist propaganda it has had to declare illegal a Pan-Malayan Federation of Trades Unions along with its affiliated State Unions. That Pan-Malayan organisation, which claimed a membership of 120,000, cannot therefore legally continue to take part in any trade dispute or promote or finance any strike or lock-out or provide strike benefits.
It is necessary to prevent carpenters from infecting miners, no doubt, or domestics from inoculating rubber-tappers with a deadly political virus distinct from innocuous aspirations for social betterment. But this Pan-Malayan Federation of Trades Unions has provided a signal example of the invertebracy of Whitehall. In the Malay States it has been abolished and legal recognition withdrawn ; in the Colony of Singapore, which was never instructed to adopt the policy of the rest of Malaya, it exists still because it has not been registered there and receives only tacit permission for its activities. Sooner or later Singapore, too, may have to break it up, seeing that already there have been instances of what looks like the centralised planning of simultaneous strikes by workmen as different in their circumstances as tin-smelters and dockers. Governments which introduced the European brand of trade union at a premature and inopportune moment can hardly be accused of wanting sympathy for Asiatic labour, but the retort to their altruism has been the emergence in modern shape of a sinister element which in another form per- meated the age-long Chinese kongsi. That this subterranean element is more contemptuous of society than it ever was is beyond dispute. Call it Communism or what you will, it has rioted through China, Burma, Siam and Malaya. But its spiritual home has been China, where, apart from being on the border of Soviet Russia, men have
never regarded the claims and value of the sovereign State as against the call of the family, the clan and the guild.
The Japanese war brought that subterranean element to the surface. In China and in Malaya anarchy became patriotism. To aggravate the misrule weapons were put into the hands of youngsters intolerant of the Confucian code with its condemnation of fighting men as the lowest of the low. Nor on our return to Malaya were British conduct and British policy always conducive to the restoration of lost prestige. The Bridal Government, in its reaction against Fascism, talked vaguely of democracy for a country where (as a prominent official of its Chinese department noted) there was no demand at all for democracy. As might have been expected what this ill-timed concern with the irrelevant did stimulate, was a notion already latent among the ignorant that the British were down and out. High officials new to Asia held out the hand of friendship to humble Asiatics who regarded their condescension with derision as a bar- barous gesture symptomatic of fear. The position recalled the remark of a Filipino when the American first hailed him as his brother. "He must be an inferior type of white man," he observed. But compared with the Chinese hooligan the Filipino was a civilised gentleman. Nor had he been given a rifle by his white friend.
Difficult as the forest-clad terrain of Malaya is for police and soldiers, it is pretty certain that hanging and banishment will soon drive terrorists to earth. But how they are to be ferreted out of Malaya altogether has yet to be discovered. If Communism were proscribed, the Kuomintang might have to be proscribed also, and then we should have antagonised all the immigrant Chinese labour in the country.
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