By early 1948 the high levels of violence that had stalked Malaya since the end of the Pacific War appeared to be ebbing a little. In January and March 1948, murders in Malaya reached a post-war low: seven in each month. Strikes were below their postwar peak.Footnote ¹ The Malayan Security Service had little new to say about communist plans in the first three months of 1948, for the simple reason that Malayan Communist Party (MCP) strategy had changed little over the previous year.Footnote ² Up until early 1948, the MCP Central Committee still supported a policy of open and legal political and union activity, frequently in cooperation with bourgeois parties. The MCP Central Committee meeting of 20–26 March 1948 was to change all this.

In April 1948 strikes proliferated, attended by increased violence, intimidation and murder. Murder incidents had fallen from 1946 to 1947 (from a yearly 421 to 220) but in 1948, they shot up to 470, almost entirely due to a surge in and after April.Footnote ³ By May and early June, murders of Asian (Europeans were as yet rarely targets) labour contractors, employers and MCP opponents had increased markedly.

Events came to a head in June. The MCP was increasing its labour action. On 1 June a police baton charge, aimed at evicting workers from their Johor estate, left seven workers dead. The MCP ‘defence’ of workers intensified, culminating in the events of 16 June.Footnote ⁴ Until then, political murders had been growing, but still averaging less than one a day. But on this one day three European estate managers and two Asians were killed. Growing exasperation at the government's inability to counter the threat now exploded on to the front pages of the press. The next day, the Straits Times thundered that High Commissioner Edward Gent should ‘Govern or Get Out’. On the 18^th, Gent declared a national state of emergency: one that would officially last until July 1960, and involve up to 8,000 insurgents on one side, and up to 40,000 troops, 70,000 police and 250,000 Home Guards on the other. In the hours and days that followed the declaration of an emergency, more than 1,000 left-wing and union activists were detained without trial under Emergency powers. But that did not save Gent's career or, indirectly, his life. Recalled to London for talks, he was killed when his aircraft crashed near London early in the following month.

What is to be explained: The transition from united fronts to Asia-wide revolts

We need to explain this dramatic change in Malaya, which can be dated to between February and June 1948. The suddenness of the change naturally leads to questions about the role of MCP planning. Given the radical change in the MCP stance over the course of early 1948, how did this occur and what role did it play in the outbreak of the Malayan Emergency?

Yet MCP planning cannot be seen in isolation. The contrast between the local situation in late 1947 and late 1948 is astonishing for many Asian countries, not just for Malaya. In mid-1947, left-wing parties in India, and across most of Southeast Asia, were either in a state of uneasy truce with governments, or engaged in open, constitutional politics. The priority was rebuilding after the war, ending shortages and winning independence, which would come in a wave of decolonisation to India and Pakistan (15 August 1947), Burma (4 January 1948) and Ceylon (4 February 1948). In Indochina, the Viet Minh continued to control much of the north of the country, briefly negotiating with the French, while in Indonesia the main contest was not ideological but rather between nationalist Indonesian Republicans on the one hand, and the Dutch on the other. The Soviet Union itself still supported an international communist line of pursuing ‘united front’ tactics with anti-colonial bourgeois parties.

Yet in 1948 such ‘united front’ tactics were abandoned in almost all these areas, with armed communist uprisings occurring in that year in Malaya, Burma, the Philippines and Indonesia, and the Franco-Viet Minh partial truce breaking down. Inevitably, this raises the additional question of whether 1948 saw the calculated opening of an Asian front in the wider, international Cold War. Hence the second major issue to be investigated is whether the Communist Party of the Soviet Union instructed or influenced the opening of a new Cold War front in Asia, including in Malaya, in 1948?

We now have two main questions. Firstly, did the MCP have a ‘plan’ for armed insurrection by mid-1948? Secondly, did the Soviet Union prompt the dramatic changes in many Asian communist parties policies between mid 1947 and late 1948?

The Cold War orthodoxy: International directives, MCP plan for revolt

In the late 1940s to early 1950s, a Cold War orthodoxy on these questions emerged, which held (in public at least), that the Soviet Union did issue instructions, that these were conveyed to Southeast Asian communist parties, and that these instructions caused the dramatic change in MCP policy and behaviour outlined above. The ‘instructions’ were said to have been first shaped at the inaugural meeting of the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) of September 1947, and in Soviet theorist Andrei Zhdanov's speech to it. This speech, later reproduced in the first edition of Cominform's journal, signalled the end of the period of ‘United Front’ political tactics, by which communist parties worldwide had tried to enter parliaments and form alliances with bourgeois parties. Zhdanov instead announced the arrival of an era of two camps – the democratic led by the Soviet Union and the imperialist led by the United States – with conflict between them increasingly inevitable. This gave impetus to communist parties worldwide to move to more combative positions, whether removing non-communists from coalitions (as in Prague in February 1948), or becoming more aggressive in opposition. The suspicion that this new line was disseminated to the Southeast Asian parties at the Calcutta conferences held in February 1948,Footnote ⁵ thereby sparking the proximate revolts across Southeast Asia, was a natural one.

After some initial confusion in British official circles in mid-1948,Footnote ⁶ this was the conclusion towards which British officials veered. In the words of a 1957 British military summary of the Emergency: ‘In June 1948, on the instructions of the Cominform issued at two conferences in Cacutta four months earlier, the MCP started a campaign of murder, sabotage and terrorism designed to paralyse the Government and develop into armed insurrection.’

In short, the Malayan Emergency was a local branch of the Asian Cold War, which was in turn a Moscow-directed extension of the Western Cold War.Footnote ⁷

The revisionist interpretation: No international directives, no plan

Recent scholarship is sceptical about this ‘Cold War orthodoxy’. The pre-eminent expert on British colonial records for Malaya, Anthony Stockwell, argued strongly against both propositions in a 1993 article. In 2006 he gave a succinct summary of his position, writing in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society that:

The ‘others’ referred to presumably include Tim Harper, who had argued that British attempts to remove illegal rural squatters – most being communist supporters – from the forest fringe produced a welling up of violence from below in 1947 to 1948.Footnote ⁹ The problem with this latter argument is that, as the opening to this article demonstrated, violence was decreasing, not increasing immediately before the MCP's March 1948 decisions. The subsequent increase in violence was at MCP behest, not merely a despairing attempt by the leadership to harness forces from below.

Stockwell, meanwhile, does not quite pin down what did cause the change in MCP tactics, but does unequivocally reject the notion that the party was simply Moscow's puppet. For convenience sake, we will dub this and other works which reject the Cold War orthodoxy ‘revisionist’. As I have discussed elsewhere, most scholarly, specialist accounts from the 1970s follow this line.Footnote ¹⁰

This mainstream, ‘revisionist’ academic historiography developed roughly as follows. In 1958, Ruth McVey argued that what mattered was not the Calcutta Conferences, but the gradual dissemination of the change in the international communist line from September 1947. For her, the Calcutta Conferences merely added tinder to the fire.

Now, one way of interpreting McVey would be that people were looking for the wrong ‘murder weapon’: for ‘instructions’, when the real weapon was an international communist line. But that is not, unfortunately, how most subsequent scholars have proceeded. Instead, working on the assumption that the international factor was peripheral, they have stressed how internal processes drove events, and ultimately caused the local revolts in general, and the Malayan Emergency specifically.

The tendency has been to cite increasingly varied local reasons, pictured as coalescing to where revolt was all but inevitable by early 1948. As early as 1975, Anthony Short's classic work, The communist insurrection in Malaya, argued the issues were complex and ambivalent. According to him they included, for instance: tightening British labour legislation; and MCP reaction against the united front policy of its former leader Lai Teck, who had absconded in March 1947. Lai Teck was exposed as having betrayed his party to the Japanese during the occupation, and to the British before and after the war. As his treachery was gradually unveiled to lower and lower echelons of the party, the former ‘united front’ line he had championed was poisoned by association. It was also failing of its own accord, since in 1947 to 1948 the British ignored protests which the MCP launched in coordination with the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the embryonic Malayan Democratic Union and other organisations. These protests campaigned against new citizenship laws which restricted the number of Chinese granted citizenship, and against the new Malayan Federation constitution which re-entrenched Malay Sultans as sovereign in their states, and as guardians of Malay interests. These moves seemed to them retrogressive, and to signify a British retreat to reliance on conservative Malay forces represented by UMNO. Hence when the Malayan Federation was inaugurated on 1 February 1948 (to replace the Malayan Union of 1946–48), the MCP was very frustrated indeed.Footnote ¹¹

It is not surprising, given the varied problems the imperial archive reveals the MCP faced by early 1948, that academics increasingly concentrated on domestic explanations. By the 1980s, authors such as Stubbs and Stockwell clearly favoured complex, multicausal explanations, which blended MCP reaction to increasing British labour controls, MCP leadership problems and, to a decreasing degree, international changes.Footnote ¹² Inevitably some military and non-specialist historians were slower to come round, but they were outside of the mainstream of academic ‘revisionist’ literature. The latter is reflected in Stockwell's seminal 1993 article, the substance of which was very recently restated by Deery in his 2007 piece for the Journal of Cold War Studies. Footnote ¹³ Stockwell's 1993 article suggested rising MCP violence had diverse causes, and that by mid-1948, it was not yet at the stage of fully planned rebellion.Footnote ¹⁴

I have used this approach myself in the past, describing the Emergency's origins as multicausal, its outbreak as ‘over-determined’. That is, when the MCP took its decisions to prepare the ground for ‘people's revolutionary war’, during the March and May 1948 Central Committee meetings, it was faced with the treachery of its former Secretary General, a record low of post-war violence around February 1948, a decline in strikes, government clearing of its squatter supporters from the jungle fringe, looming trade union legislation, and a communist international line now rejecting previous over-optimism. Hence, ‘the resort to violence was massively over-determined’.Footnote ¹⁵

In these circumstances it might appear that any few of the many factors might have been sufficient to provoke the MCP change of strategy. This current consensus is not only strong, but has deep roots. As long ago as 1960, McLane was saying much the same, that given so many reasons, no one factor (including the international) could be deemed a necessary cause. He wrote that:

This ‘provocation’ included British coercive measures, in particular, increasing control over labour matters and trade unions. The argument that the MCP was pushed into a corner and given little choice by these was put most strongly by New Zealand scholar Michael Stenson.Footnote ¹⁷ Stenson lists a formidable battery of British measures. There included use of trespass laws to remove union organisers from rubber estates and other commercial property from late 1947, thus giving the appearance that they were siding with employers. In the same period, police fired on strikers and demonstrators on a number of occasions, with resulting fatalities almost entirely on the protesting side. There was also the selective use of banishment orders in Singapore against union and communist organisers alleged to have encouraged sedition, or violence, and who were not born locally. Finally, the MCP became aware in early 1948 that the government was discussing more restrictive union legislation, which ultimately arrived in the form of the Trade Union Ordinance of 31 May 1948.

The Ordinance banned Federations of Trade Unions, except those organised by trade. This was aimed against communist control of the Pan Malayan Federation of trade unions in Malaya, and the Singapore Federation of Trade Unions. It ordered that Trade Union officials should have three years trade experience, again, attempting to rule out many of the communists' semi-professional organisers.

More recently, MCP Secretary-General Chin Peng has developed a similar line. The background to this is Chin Peng's emergence since the end of the Cold War. In December 1989 the MCP signed a peace accord with Thai and Malaysian representatives. Since then, Chin Peng has waged a campaign to publicise his version of events, notably at an academic seminar in Canberra in 1999, and through a book. The latter comprises Chin Peng's story as told to Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor, Alias Chin Peng: My side of the story (2003). According to Chin Peng's version of the Emergency origins: ‘The decisive factor was the internal situation’, in other words British repression. He emphasises the British refusal to listen to protests against the dropping of more liberal citizenship proposals and of the Malayan Union Constitution of 1946 and refusing to listen to the 1947 protests,Footnote ¹⁸ the increase in repression of labour organisation, and the new Trade Union legislation of May 1948.Footnote ¹⁹

Elsewhere he states that ‘the prominent factor that influenced us, when we decided to take up arms, was the British policy at the time. We felt we were being cornered, gradually backed into the corner. We had nowhere to move. … Of course, the international factor played some role, but not as decisive as that.’Footnote ²⁰ He argues that, after the ‘two camp’ theory was published in the Cominform journal of November 1947, they nevertheless decided in December to continue the ‘united front’ policy. The communal divisions in Malaya, and the people being ‘thirsty for peace’, made a change seem wrong, despite the fact that it was the disgraced Lai Teck's policy.

Chin Peng goes further, and dates the first real questioning of MCP policy to 31 January to 1 February 1948, when an unnamed ‘Politburo member’

So according to Chin Peng the meeting recommenced after Chinese New Year, and finally decided Lai Teck had been wrong to halt the armed struggle. Hence they called a March Central Committee meeting to discuss it. He further argues that the ‘internal situation’ predominated at the 17–21 March meeting, by which time they knew of the Government's proposed new Trade Union legislation (the 31 May Ordinance).Footnote ²¹ He acknowledges, as we will see below, that they also discussed international changes, particularly the Indian Communist Party's change to a more militant line (taken at its Second Congress in February to early March). However, he interprets these as not the primary concerns.

He argues also that the MCP's decisions, taken in March and then at the May 1948 Central Executive Committee meetings, were fundamentally ‘defensive’ and reactive. For instance, he turns on its head the orthodox Cold War interpretation of Australian communist leader L. Sharkey's attendance at the MCP's March 1948 meeting. The orthodox interpretation was that Sharkey – the leader of the Communist Party of Australia – transmitted Comintern instructions on the ‘two camp’ thesis and the need for armed revolt. While Sharkey, en route from Calcutta to Australia did attend the March MCP meeting, Chin Peng argues that he did not transmit any instructions received in Calcutta. Instead, Sharkey's most effective contribution was to suggest a solution to the MCP's labour failures based on Australian experience. Indeed, if taken literally, Sharkey becomes almost the main culprit for the Malayan Emergency. In Chin Peng's words:

According to Chin Peng the Central Committee was divided, and Sharkey's advice was decisive, given the Australian Communist Party's reputation for being able to sustain labour disputes.Footnote ²³

The March meeting therefore decided on ‘defensive violence’ to support labour disputes. The May Central Committee meeting went further, and concluded that the result of this policy would be increasing British repression — for instance the proposed May 1948 Trade Union Amendment. It therefore called for gradually increasing defensive violence up to and including an inevitable final people's war. By June, therefore, the MCP were preparing their supporters for the ultimate ‘full-scale’ British attack. In his words, ‘So we had to get our armed forces ready, our nucleus ready before September. Not launching our armed uprising in September but get ready before September. So when the full-scale attack happens, we can react.’ In the meantime, another Central Committee meeting was to be held in July or August, in time (by the MCP's reckoning) to make more detailed plans. These, it was expected, would include a move to set up a headquarters in the fairly inaccessible interior of Pahang, and a liberated state in mountainous parts of the northeastern state of Kelantan which had harboured the MPAJA during the war.Footnote ²⁴

Chin Peng's version therefore fits the ‘revisionist’ position fairly well, in arguing that there was little international influence. He modifies it in accepting there was an MCP plan of sorts, but sees this as a series of intended ‘defensive’ responses to increasing British repression. Chin Peng's version of events forms a bridge to the next sections, which re-examine the historiography against original documents, mostly from 1948 itself, and reads Chin Peng's statements and actions ‘against the grain’. These two sections deal firstly with the international communist line, and secondly with the question of what MCP plans were in 1948.

New documents and approaches: Were there international communist directives?

This section re-examines the sources in order to demonstrate that the ‘revisionist’ case of communist international influence in 1948 is misplaced. The revisionist case is that there were no communist instructions for armed revolt, and that no such instructions were disseminated at the two Calcutta conferences of February 1948. But that case is a crude rebuttal of a Cold War orthodoxy that McVey punctured as early as 1958. It is outmoded – indeed should have been outmoded even in the 1960s – and naïve about how international communism worked in 1948.

I therefore propose a ‘neo-orthodox’ or ‘post-revisionist’ case that the change in the communist international line was critical in causing a clustering of local revolts in 1948. At the most, we could argue the communist international line ensured revolts where otherwise they would not have happened that year (perhaps in India, Burma and possibly Malaya too). At the least, we must insist that the Soviet role needs to be given greater weight within nuanced, multi-causal models of the outbreak of the ‘Asian Cold War’.

This is not, of course, to deny that much of what the revisionist line claims is useful. It is certainly true that the MCP felt under multiple pressures in early 1948, from the defection of Lai Teck, new labour legislation, its failure to persuade the British to drop the federal constitution, and more. It is true that, despite the decisions of March and May, the MCP was far from ready to launch a full revolt by June 1948. In fact, many cadres were arrested before they could flee. In addition, it is true that some orthodox Cold War accounts of the Emergency origins did portray events far too simplistically as caused by ‘instructions’ relayed from Moscow and through Calcutta, whether for internal or external propaganda reasons, or sometimes because they honestly came to believe this.Footnote ²⁵

But the starting point for re-evaluating events is the realisation that the Cold War orthodoxy on ‘instructions’ is an irrelevance, doubted by some even at the time. Worse, it leads to scholars asking the wrong questions about 1948, notably: were there instructions from Moscow for a revolt? Even in 1948, some British officials were groping towards a more subtle view than the full Cold War orthodoxy: one that did not assume a straightforward dissemination of Moscow's orders through Calcutta or anywhere else. Officials in the office of Britain's Commissioner-General for Southeast Asia (located in Singapore) – Britain's premier regional centre – are interesting in this respect. In late 1948 they traced how regional parties aligned with a change in the prestigious international communist line over a period of months. They tried to show how local parties tailored their lines to local conditions, starting even before the Calcutta meetings.

The best illustration of this sort of analysis is a little-used November 1948 document from the Commissioner-General's Office. In November 1948 the Commissioner-General for Southeast Asia sent the Foreign Office a detailed summary. This claimed that Soviet theorist Zhdanov's report to Cominform of September 1947, ‘For a Lasting Peace, For a People's Democracy’, as published in the Cominform journal of November, was soon disseminated in India, Malaya and Burma. It particularly noted local parties accepting, in the following three to four months, Zdhanov's criticism of optimistic illusions. Additionally, it attached a chart with over 30 stages of evidence of such dissemination. What follows are just a few of the key dates the chart traces:Footnote ²⁶

1. 10. 11.1947.

Zhdanov's report on the International Situation is published in the first issue of the Cominform Journal – having been developed at end September.

3. 7.12.47-17.12.47

Communist Party of India (CPI) accepts paper on ‘Present Policy and Tasks of the CPI’ and criticises former ‘opportunistic illusions’…

5. 25.12.47

Mao's report to Central Executive Committee (CEC) [of the Chinese Communist Party] echoes Zhdanov's report….

8. 1.2.48-

Communists from all over the world arrive in Calcutta for the Southeast Asia Youth and Student Conference…

10. Feb.48

Probably the 1^st Politburo of Burma Communist Party decides to adopt a policy of ‘open resistance’.

11. 19.2.48

Southeast Asia Youth Conference opens….

13. 22.2.48

(1) Lawrence SHARKEY, President Australian CP, passes through Singapore en route to 2^nd Party Congress of CPI, Calcutta.

(2) Burma CP delegates leave Rangoon for Calcutta.

14. 28.2.48

2nd Party Congress CPI opens in Calcutta – numerous foreign delegates present. THAN TUN of BCP states his party striving to forge links with Chinese CP…

16. 5.3.48

(1) 2^nd Party Congress of CPI passes main political resolution at closed session, calling for new policy of opposition to Nehru Government.

(2) In Rangoon, BOC Workers' Union, under chairmanship of its leader, a prominent communist agitator, decided to strike from 9.3.48. H.N. GHOAL believed to be in Rangoon directing action.

17. 6.3.48

Closed session of CPI Party Congress passes resolution criticising past policy of CPI.

18. 7.3.48.

Open Session of CPI Congress deposes JOSHI and elects BT RANADIVE as new General Secretary of CPI. WICKRAMASINGHE, leader of Communist Party of Ceylon, announces his party has made similar mistakes to those of CPI…

21. 20.3.48–

Central Executive Committee of MCP approves plan for armed revolt. Produces thesis ‘The Existing Situation’…Footnote ²⁷

The full account interweaves events across South and Southeast Asia, trying to demonstrate a discernable shift, with the language of that shift reflecting the ‘two camp’ line. For instance, it attached the key MCP paper ‘The existing situation’, as tabled at the critical MCP Central Executive Meeting of 17–21 March 1947. This repeated the ‘two camp’ Zhdanov formula and pronounced cooperation with the British Labour Party useless. ‘Under these circumstances’, the paper demanded full independence (not the self-government previously demanded) and pronounced ‘the people's revolutionary war’ to be ‘inevitable’, with ‘armed struggle’ of particular significance. In addition, the Malayan Security Service reported (contrary to Chin Peng's later claims) that CCP advice from Chou En-lai had been that revolt was ultimately necessary in colonial territories.Footnote ²⁸

It is difficult to understand just how loyal the document is to the logic and language of the new international line without seeing the document as a whole. But some highlights can easily demonstrate that the international line was far from peripheral. The document ‘The existing situation’ began with the words ‘A fundamental change has taken place in the post-war international situation…’. It proceeded to a detailed recounting of the ‘two camps’ thesis of Zhdanov, and how the colonial territories could play an important part in preventing capitalist countries from preparing for war or going to war. It then added that:

The decisions as a whole were firmly anchored in, and justified by, the changing international communist line. Armed rebellion was thus presented – in March – as the inevitable end result, but the emphasis was for the moment on preparation, on preparing a front of the lower workers and peasants. This last reflected the conclusion that the alliance with the bourgeoisie, in the AMCJA-Putera front of 1947 for instance, had failed.

The same language was repeated in a statement published in the Chinese-language paper Voice of the People on 20 April 1948, which sought to explain and justify the new policy to the rank and file. Entitled ‘Understand the situation, master the orientation’, this began by arguing that the previous illusions of the British Labour Party had been stripped away, revealing it for the tool of international capitalism and the imperial force that it was. In trying to argue that the party's supporters were strong – by implication strong enough to ‘continue their struggle along the bloody footprints of those who had gone before’ – the document also emphasised that ‘the broad masses of the Malayan people are part of the world anti-imperialist democratic camp’. This document, however, being intended for consumption by a broad base of supporters, gave over more time to addressing the particularities of British policy, countering doubts, and making suggestions for correct policy and reliance on the working classes. Despite that, it was in effect a reassurance that a drift to violence accorded with international circumstances.

In addition to the MCP's secret decisions of March, and its public statement of April, a close reading of the documentation casts doubt on Chin Peng's spin on Sharkey's role at the March Central Committee meeting. Chin Peng claims Sharkey had little influence over this meeting, except to suggest a means of strengthening mass organisation in this next stage: an anti-scab policy including murder. But at least one Surrendered Enemy Personnel (SEP — an official term for surrendered communists) claimed to have seen more explosive advice. In November 1948 this Leong Yat Seng told his British interrogators that there was

We cannot know whether such advice was given, but even if it was not, it seems likely that Sharkey's presence in March, combined with his supposed practical knowledge, was being used to help justify the shift to more violent tactics. The argument that a risky shift to violence was supported by other world figures, and fitted with world communist policy, was not unimportant when the actual conditions in Malaya – particularly in terms of deep communal differences – were so unripe for revolt.

Another informant knew of no ‘instructions’ nor of a Calcutta conference even, but did know that Sharkey (identified by his post) had criticised the MCP for missing its opportunity immediately after the war when the international situation was discussed.Footnote ³¹ This and early June articles in communist newspapers lauding the Indochina example, raise questions. The Singapore Intelligence Far East (SIFE) organisation also had Sharkey as one of the people criticising the Indian Communist Party at its Second Congress in Calcutta in February 1948, just before the latter changed General Secretary and adopted a more aggressive policy.Footnote ³² The others criticising CPI policy were Than Tun of Burma and Wickremasinghe of Ceylon/Sri Lanka, suggesting almost an emerging consensus that communist parties should harden their policies towards bourgeois leaders, and rely more on workers and lower bourgeosie (a shift to a ‘united front from below’ as opposed to the former ‘united front from above’).Footnote ³³ Then Sharkey turned up in Singapore at the March MCP meeting, and the MCP shortly afterwards adopted motions in similar ‘two camp’ language, with a similar acceptance that violence was inevitable. In short, if we abandon ‘Orthodox Cold War’ notions of Sharkey and others bringing orders, we can see that nevertheless by February to March 1948 there was almost a regional consensus – or at least conversation – on the import of the changed international line.

While we can still argue about how far the changing international line – and its discussion and reception across Asia – caused or merely coloured events, and how far the consensus was manufactured in Asia itself, it would be difficult to deny that it provided the language in which the critical decisions were debated.

We should also note that the May 1948 Central Committee meeting confirmed the need to prepare for eventual armed revolt. That was a working out of the consequences of the March policy in action, as British repression increased and a new Trade Union ordinance was about to be published (end of May, effective mid-June). The May Fifth Plenum of the MCP's CC adopted a 12-point ‘plan of struggle’, emphasising illegal work from then on, using strikes to disrupt the economy, assaulting the democratic parties and bourgeoisie including the Kuomintang (Guomindang), and proposed measures to attract peasant and intellectual support.Footnote ³⁴

I want to suggest a model for the influence of the Soviet line, and for its role in the outbreak of the Malayan Emergency. It helps if we remind ourselves again that most ‘revisionist’ literature (that is, almost all the relevant specialist literature on Malaysia of the last two decades) starts with the wrong question, being: Did Moscow issue directives, passed on at two Calcutta conferences in February 1948, which caused the opening of a new, Southeast Asian front in the Cold War? They therefore arrive at the easy answer: No.

We need to ask a different question, namely: what influence did the international communist line have in 1948? This results in a very different answer. We see that Zhdanov's ‘two camp’ line was being disseminated amongst Asian parties by late 1947, causing at first a tentative reappraisal and, by February 1948, a widespread and dramatic reappraisal of policies in parties across much of Asia.Footnote ³⁵ The Communist Party of the Soviet Union's ‘international line’ and criticism of past optimism and united front policies was influential, and discussed region-wide. As such, it had weight when local parties debated their next actions, particularly where local conditions had previously been thought unpropitious for armed revolt, or local parties were in a state of ambivalence following setbacks.

In some cases, where local conditions had been thought ambivalent at best, the international line may have played a critical role that year. Perhaps in Burma (and despite Burmese independence in January 1948), the international line may have helped swing debate in favour of armed revolt.Footnote ³⁶ It is true that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reportedly told Chin Peng that local parties had to interpret the international line in the context of local conditions, but that was little more than a truism.Footnote ³⁷

This interpretation of how the ‘international line’ worked was long ago explained by Ralph Smith, though for a slightly later date.Footnote ³⁸ That is, local parties drew strength not just from the prestige and success of the Soviet Union (the People's Republic of China too from 1949), but from being part of a scientific world movement. As such, any international ‘line’ propagated by the CPSU had to be engaged with, indeed was often eagerly engaged with. We should perhaps go further, and add that local players were not passive recipients. Harry Poeze's article on Indonesia in this issue, for instance, raises the question of how far Indonesian communist Muso was an emissary of a strict line or instructions from Moscow in August 1948, or how far he was perhaps over-enthusiastic, in taking on the role of bringer of the new international line. This obviously suited his desire for eminence after a long exile, and probably reflected the infectious enthusiasm of his communist hosts in Prague, who had taken more complete control of their own country in February 1948. It is certainly the case that some officials in Moscow were not entirely sure whether he might overdo it, and alienate people locally. Unfortunately for the Indonesian party, he was all too successful in firing them up, and alarming opponents, with dreadful results at Madiun in September.Footnote ³⁹ The question is therefore not just how a Moscow line was transmitted, but which individuals and groups locally took up and used that line in their own debates, and to serve their own needs. Moscow could not always predict what local reception would be, and it seems in some instances may have been diffident about advising on situations it knew it did not fully comprehend.Footnote ⁴⁰

New documents and approaches: Was there a communist plan?

The ‘revisionist’ approach to MCP planning also begins with the wrong question. It asks: ‘Did the MCP have a plan to begin armed violence in June 1948? As with the revisionist approach to international communist planning, the obvious answer is no. But then the question is itself flawed. The real questions we should be asking are: what were the MCP's plans, as laid out in its March and May 1948 CC meetings, and afterwards? What were their implications? These open questions are far more useful than the leading one which invites a simple yes/no answer.

What I want to do now is to start with Chin Peng's interpretation of MCP plans, and then afterwards examine communist documents from the period in question, before answering this new question. Chin Peng has emphasised that the MCP were unprepared for revolt in June 1948. He has presented the MCP as pushed reluctantly into revolt by government repression. He accepts that its March and May 1948 decisions did provide a programme of preparations for violence, but argues this was a ‘defensive’ posture in response to increasing British repression, and closing down of democratic space. He also accepts that the MCP anticipated that action and reaction between the two sides was expected to lead to large-scale armed conflict, though only in or after September 1948.

Here it is best, perhaps, to let Chin Peng speak for himself. Here is his most relevant exchange with historians in Canberra at the 1999 gathering:

Chin Peng further insisted that: ‘The decisive factor was the internal situation’, which he specifies as British repression of labour activism, and unwillingness to respond to protests against the new Malayan Federation.Footnote ⁴² But we must take into account Chin Peng's aims. These include showing that the MCP were a vital part of the nationalist struggle for independence, and so acknowledging external influences does not sit well with this aim. As we have already seen, however, the March 1948 documents were written in the language of international communism and of Cominform's ‘two camp’ theory.

Chin Peng's version of events thus fits into the broad ‘revisionist’ interpretation of 1948, in denying significant outside influence, and in denying the communists had firm plans for the events which gave rise to the Emergency.Footnote ⁴³ Within this paradigm, he takes Stenson's argument for the MCP being reactive to British control of labour policy, and closing down of political space, one step further. For instance, he emphasises that, when the MCP CC took its May 1948 decisions to prepare for defensive war, they already knew that the new Trade Union Ordinance of 31 May 1948 was pending.

In short, there may not have been a formal, written document or finalised MCP plan. But there was an outline programme or informal plan by mid-1948, one intended to end in armed rebellion. This aimed to prepare the ground by increasing labour violence and targeting enemies of the workers such as European planters. Small platoons were also to be mobilised as the basis for later guerrilla expansion. After government repression, they would finally begin full mobilisation, establish a Pahang headquarters, and liberate certain isolated areas of Kelantan, in the north.

Thus when Chin Peng later called the three murders of European managers of 16 June a ‘mistake’ (they happened in his own state of Perak), what he meant is that they went too far for that particular time. That is, these ‘three’ murders on one day (actually five, most people discounting the two Asian assistants murdered at the same time, but elsewhere) prematurely triggered the final stage. Chin Peng's version is thus that by May 1948 the British fully intended to increase pressure on the MCP, and the MCP had a ‘defensive’ programme of action, which it was anticipated would both prepare the people and gradually provoke greater British repression. The MCP ‘plan’ or rather loose programme, was therefore for a series of defensive moves which, it was anticipated, would result in ‘defensive’ resort to full armed revolt in or shortly after September 1948. Trigger factors would include the banning of the party. The MCP would meet sometime before September – probably in July or August – to finalise their plans for the last ‘defensive’ stage.

The question then is: Do documents from 1948 confirm the revisionist emphasis on the MCP not having a firm plan in June 1948? Do they alter Chin Peng's ‘revisionist + defensive plans versus increasing government repression’ interpretation? Or, alternatively, do they suggest a more aggressive MCP stance, and more concrete MCP plans?

The March 1948 MCP Central Committee decisions (discussed above) are of relatively little help to us in this respect. They were indeed heavily couched in the ‘two camps’ language of Cominform, with its assumption of inevitable conflict. Yet the immediate plans appear to have concentrated merely on increasing control of labour, and preparing the masses. The question is whether this was Chin Peng's ‘defensive’ stance, or a more aggressive preparation of mass control for later revolt.

It is worth noting the events of June 1948 involved a change in the scale of intimidation – from violence to murder – rather than something entirely new. The Malayan Security Service (MSS) noted that the Workers' Self Protection Corps – who used violence to ‘protect’ union activities – had been a fixture before March 1948.Footnote ⁴⁴ Chin Peng's version has this as a defensive move — and certainly the government had used the police to break strikes where there was violence or occupation of property, sometimes with loss of life. But at the same time, there are indications that as this policy got off the ground in April, it was far from merely a defensive use of violence against kongchak (labour thieves or scabs) and notorious employers. Instead, it seems to have been an attempt to consolidate control over labour and populations through eliminating or intimidating opposition.

Hence the MSS detected an attempt to use the Singapore Harbour Labour Union for politically motivated strikes in April, to be followed by a 1 May mass rally of 100,000. In the words of an MSS report this was intended to be:

Surrendered Enemy Personnel such as Leong Yat Seng confirmed this. Leong had become a communist in February 1947, a member of the Open Section of the Naval Base Harbour Union, and during the Emergency, joined the Liberation Army. He describes April to May plans to hide many organisers, and press strikes. He said it had been intended ‘at the appropriate time … to join forces with other organisations in Singapore, and to burn down godowns, blow up ammunition dumps and obtain supplies of food, money, etc. for the forces up-country’. Arrests had intervened, persuading him to flee up-country, ‘guided by a lady with one eye much bigger than the other’.Footnote ⁴⁵

This particular MCP plan was cut off by selective banishments of labour leaders, arrests of protection corps members, a 22 April order banning the procession, and then further arrests of SHLU leaders who threatened to defy the ban. The SHLU called off the procession on its eve. The Singapore government policy was to banish any non-British subject (Chinese persons born in Singapore were British subjects) who was implicated in labour intimidation or violence. Intimidation now included sporadic use of grenades.Footnote ⁴⁶

There was, in short, an escalating battle for labour control, in which MCP use of violence was met by government banishments and arrests, and the latter were followed by increasing arson and selective strikes in April to early May.

But the real question is how far, and how soon, the MCP strategy became much more ambitious in its scope. The MSS analysis, albeit of August, was that the aim had been to secure union control by violence, and use labour control to soften up the population. In other words, it was a way of preparing the ground for full-scale revolt. But other evidence suggested, rightly or wrongly, much worse.

A 23 June statement by a detained Chinese MCP Area Representative (Political Section) in Perak certainly suggests a more aggressive, proactive policy preparing the ground. Under the title of ‘MCP Organisation and Policy’, the prisoner stated that:

A later source — an interrogation of SEP Tan Ah Leng from late 1948 (a Singapore-born Hokkien rubber tapper, aged 24), fleshed out the techniques he had seen used in the 1946–48 labour movement. First of all, apparent elections would be fixed, with those to be elected decided by the MCP beforehand

According to Tan Ah Leng, the workers ‘clearly understood’ that it was in their best interests to ‘follow the men who make the speeches’.Footnote ⁴⁸ This corroborates the source quoted above, that ‘the first thing is to eliminate all opposition … Anyone not for the MCP is against the MCP and must be eliminated – hence the recent killings’, with contractors as prime targets. Other sources talked of gradations of warnings for opponents to cease, leave or, as the last resort, face punishment.Footnote ⁴⁹ At some point, then, Chin Peng's ‘defensive’ violence against labour thieves, supposedly encouraged by Sharkey, transmuted into a violent struggle to control the entire labour movement, and also to eliminate others who stood in the way of the MCP, including KMT sympathisers.

We cannot be sure exactly how the transition was made from selective violence in support of labour control to more widespread assassination. What we do know is that in May 1948 the MCP CC met and issued the new orders described above, which were more practical measures to prepare for revolt.

This coincided with an increase in murders, culminating in 19 cases of murder or attempted murder in the first two weeks of June.Footnote ⁵⁰ The end of May was also important in that this was the month that Lai Teck's betrayal was finally announced to rank and file members.Footnote ⁵¹

As early as June, MSS sources suggested that the MCP aimed at an eventual all-out attack, but with three stages to prepare the ground. To quote the MSS summary of its intelligence:

1. i. the organisation of labour unrest [evident from April 1948]

2. ii. terrorism-murder of labour contractors, traitors, capitalists, members of the KMT, kepalas, planters, tin-miners and ‘key’ Government officials [this intensified in May and June, leading the British to declare the Emergency]

3. iii. when the chaos resulting from (ii) above has been completed, then armed revolution, supported by strong forces of guerrillas from the hills.Footnote ⁵²

According to this MSS assessment, ‘During the second stage the MCP hope to weaken Government considerably. They intend to murder detectives, police, MSS, and other key Government personnel, which they hope will wreck the morale of the remainder.’Footnote ⁵³

Simultaneously with phase ii, the MCP had set up ‘secret’ State Committees by April. A report from the end of April suggested the successor to the wartime MPAJA organisation was already compiling fresh lists of names, to facilitate any emergency call up By early June – before the Emergency declaration – it was calling up ex-MPAJA and others to form small mobile groups, which could later form the platform for guerrilla groups. Some SEP reported being warned to go underground before May.Footnote ⁵⁴ Registration itself was reportedly complete by 14 June. By that point its ‘secret’ members had already been mobilised as mobile units or special service corps, though not its open members. The MSS was getting intelligence on where specific area mobile units were based.Footnote ⁵⁵ On 11 June the ex-MPAJA leadership met in Kuala Lumpur under President Lau Yew. They ordered preparations to be made to sell all its property, the destruction of records and preparation for mobilisation to the hills, and all future orders to be given verbally. The banning of the MCP and satellite organisations was to be the signal for general mobilisation, and a 14 June report suggested 500 men could be mobilised in Selangor within three days of the order coming.Footnote ⁵⁶

On 15 June a Min Sheng Pao editorial on ‘Complete exposure of the cruel countenance’, described British policy as imperialist, fascist and anti-democratic, supposedly making union work impossible, adding that: ‘Today what Imperialism wants is the gun and not the law … The Malayan history will repeat once more that of 1942–1945. Imperialism has openly declared war on the people and pointed its guns at their chests.’ The message was stark: 1948 was 1942, and the people ‘will remember the methods used against the Fascists’.Footnote ⁵⁷

The MCP plan was wrecked, since Chin Peng and his colleagues failed to anticipate the early British declaration of an Emergency, locally on 16 June and throughout Malaya by 18 June. They had already ordered key personnel to move into secret locations, or at least not to stay in one place, but nevertheless they were pitched into the full-scale stage half-prepared.Footnote ⁵⁸ Hence the MSS quickly realised that the MCP would not complete mobilisation until September 1948, and the three-stage guerrilla strategy for the war itself was hastily improvised. By July 1948 this was already known to involve a classic Maoist three stage strategy of:

1. i. Guerrilla warfare and demoralisation of the country;

2. ii. Establishment of a Communist regime in ‘liberated country areas’, including the Gua Musang/Pulai area in the mountainous region of the northeastern state of Kelantan (a wartime stronghold).

3. iii. Attacks on towns and the amalgamation of towns with the ‘liberated areas’.Footnote ⁵⁹

This ambitious policy was proposed by a party which, in December 1947, had still been doubtful that objective conditions in the country suited revolt, and concerned about how to inform members that the party's former Secretary General was a traitor and had fled with party funds in February to March 1947.