The Malayan Emergency and Anti-colonial Insurgency

One Day We’ll Understand by Sim Chi Yin focuses on the historiographies of the 1948 to 1960 anti-colonial war in Malaya, often referred to as the Malayan Emergency. Since 2015, she has developed photographic series, videos, a practice-based PhD, and now, this multimedia performance, inspired by a hidden chapter in her family history. Her grandfather Shen Huansheng, a newspaper editor and photographer, was one of thousands of suspected Communists deported by the British from Malaya to China in 1949, where he was killed by Kuomintang soldiers. Determined to excavate this family secret, Sim visited her ancestral home in Meizhou, China and sought out, interviewed and photographed exiles and former guerrillas from her grandfather’s generation living across China and Southeast Asia. In the series Remnants and the video Requiem, Sim took a documentary approach, while for Interventions, she worked with archival materials from the British Imperial War Museum. For her recent video The Mountain That Hid and photographic objects The Suitcase is a Little Bit Rotten, Sim speculatively traces intergenerational connections across time and space. Elements of all these works are incorporated into this performance. Through this project, Sim challenges official accounts by recovering personal and marginalised voices, and creating artistic responses to absences in master narratives. 

Interpreting the Malayan Emergency

Mainstream interpretations of the Malayan Emergency cast it as a paradigm of counterinsurgency for Britain against the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) and a new Cold War front in Asia.^₁ An ideological framing, however, understates anti-colonial and pro-independence stances of players including the MCP.^₂ After World War II, the MCP’s popularity was buoyed by its role in resisting Japanese occupation.^₃ Meanwhile, socio-economic instability caused by depressed wages, unemployment and inflation proved opportune for the MCP to amass political power by infiltrating trade unions and organising strikes, in the name of overthrowing British rule to establish national independence.^₄ The MCP attempted to form a “united front” by allying with other anti-colonial parties, calling for an elected legislative assembly and putting forth a people’s constitution. However, the British responded with repressive arrests, raids and union restrictions.^₅  By early 1948, internal party politics as well as an increasing belief that the British would never cede legal concessions prompted the MCP to take a more radical and violent approach. After the MCP killed two Chinese contractors and three British plantation owners, the British authorities declared a state of emergency in June 1948. This was to last twelve years.

At the height of the Emergency in 1951, there were 40,000 troops in Malaya. While a majority were from the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, there were also Gurkha, Fijian and African soldiers. With the Malay Regiment and Bornean Dayaks, they formed the British and Commonwealth troops. There were also 67,000 police and 250,000 Home Guard. These forces faced off against less than 8,000 insurgents at their numerical peak,^₆ with the cost of the conflict eventually mounting to USD1.4 million a week, a third of Malaya’s annual federal expenditure.^₇ The astounding firepower and resources devoted to the conflict belied its understated moniker. The British dubbed it the “Malayan Emergency” to forestall government liability toward insurance companies in the case of civil wars or insurrections. Malaya was valuable to the British, being a key global supplier of rubber and tin, with demand for rubber surging after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950. Malaya’s exports alone made up two-thirds of British colonial earnings and constituted 83 percent of the sterling bloc.^₈ Indeed, the British declaration that the strategy of securing the “hearts and minds” of the population against the insurgents has been reassessed to be first and foremost “an economic and social policy, laced with political promises that also served a military purpose”.^₉

Guerrilla warfare and mass deportation

The battlegrounds of the conflict were primarily in the jungles, where insurgents camped and occasionally clashed with Commonwealth troops. and more significantly, the border areas around plantations and villages where insurgents launched attacks and requisitioned supplies. Karl Hack’s descriptor “everyman’s land” (as opposed to “no man’s land”) captures the permeability and instability of this space where civilians, insurgents and troops regularly crossed paths._¹⁰ The MCP’s guerrilla warfare was intended to disrupt colonial rule by targeting resource sectors and means of production. In just over a six-month period in 1951 alone, they caused USD2.6 million worth of damage to the rubber industry._¹¹ The British responded by conducting aerial bombardments over jungle fringes, and developing the poisonous defoliant dioxin—better known as Agent Orange—to destroy crops grown by guerrillas in jungle clearings and roadside vegetation they used for ambush hideouts._¹² Agent Orange was later deployed much more extensively by the USA throughout Indochina during the Vietnam War._¹³

While Malaya was multi-ethnic, the insurgents and their underground support organisations were primarily Chinese, although there was also a Malay regiment. Fearing that movements between Malaya and China would bolster Communist causes, the British restricted immigration from China, and enacted mass detention and deportation without the right of appeal. They started to ship detainees to China in late 1948, aiming to deport up to 2,000 per month, including dependants._¹⁴ Shen Huangsheng was amongst the early groups of deportees in 1949. At the same time, thousands of Chinese youths were leaving to avoid military service under the Emergency Conscription Bill._¹⁵ While the British would deport over 20,000 people by 1953, these measures proved controversial, as many deportees were born in Malaya and had never been to China. They often encountered life-threatening conditions upon returning to a country wracked by civil war and natural disasters._¹⁶ After the Communists took power in China in 1949, deportation became more difficult, and Britain even considered dumping detainees on remote islands or off China’s coastline._¹⁷ As such, the British increasingly focused on population control within Malaya.

Forced resettlement

At the centre of this approach was the 1950 Briggs Plan, which forcibly resettled more than 500,000 rural dwellers, primarily of Chinese ethnicity. Most of them did not own the land they lived on and farmed, and they were not recognised or supported by Malaya’s legal and civic institutions._¹⁸ Believing that insurgents and civilians could not be separated (or, at times, even distinguished), the British had been destroying civilian properties thought to have been used to support guerrilla fighters. The most extreme forms of such violence involved the killing of unarmed civilians, such as during the 1948 Batang Kali massacre._¹⁹  The Briggs Plan systematised this coercive approach: populations of entire villages were given orders at short notice to move to new plots of land surrounded by barbed wire and sentry towers. Their old villages were demolished and burnt, and they had to build their own houses and facilities in the camps. Movement into and out of the camps was tightly controlled by curfews and military police guarding entryways._²⁰ A strictly-enforced programme of communal cooking and food control prevented villagers from bringing food outside the camps, even for their own meals._²¹ This strategy of cutting off the guerillas’ access to food supplies proved to be key to the counterinsurgency’s success, as stated by the MCP’s leader and commander, Chin Peng himself._²² The rapidity and forcefulness of the food and resettlement campaigns led to much hardship, and added to the sense that the Chinese population was being disproportionately targeted. However, in comparison to detention and deportation, resettlement marked the gradual integration of social structures into militaristic tactics, particularly after the 1952 arrival of British High Commissioner Gerald Templer. He renamed the settlement areas “New Villages” and focused on improving facilities and quality of life, putting in place policies and personnel that brought rural Chinese into administrative control of the state. Concerted propaganda campaigns contrasted the authorities’ ability to provide, against the threat of violence from the Communists._²³ Eventually the New Villages had a transformative effect and substantially increased urbanisation in Malaya.

The counterinsurgency paradigm in the scholarship about this era has perpetuated the Emergency as the predominant way to understand this complex period. However, revised assessments and the declassification of archives have led to more robust and nuanced interpretations of the roles and actions of the British, the Malayans and the insurgents. The fact remains that the voices of the insurgents, and even more so, ordinary people, are often underrepresented or left out. Examining the collective unconscious of this assemblage of individuals with different objectives against national histories and post-independence politics offers rich interpretive possibilities. Sim’s project, which started from a desire to rediscover a part of her family history, makes much headway in imagining the lives and stories in these lacunas. 

This essay has been commissioned by CultureLink Singapore for the Singapore premiere of One Day We’ll Understand, as part of The Studios from 30 Aug–1 Sep 2024.