Chin Peng: the Pied Piper of Malaya
Or, how to let ideology and personal hubris lead a movement over the cliff
When preparing a lecture on the Malayan Emergency this week I was struck again by the extent to which the Malayan Communist Party and its 24-year old (in 1948) leader, Chin Peng (real name Ong Boon Hua), egregiously marched his movement into idealistic and hubristic extermination. On calm reflection, and certainly with the benefit of hindsight (there are some consolations for being an historian) the Malayan Communist Party was never going to win its war in Malaya. In the early years of their campaign Chin Peng and his several thousand mainly Chinese followers thought they had a good chance of making the country too ungovernable to rule, forcing the British colonial authorities to scuttle off home, tail between proverbial legs, and establishing a socialist republic. But despite several tactical successes in the early years of the insurgency, such as the assassination of the High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney in 1951, the Malayan Communist Party never had a chance.
Deluded by the British trained and armed Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army’s ‘success’ against the Japanese, communist strategy was to foment a domestic uprising that would hurt inward investment at a time when worldwide demand for rubber and tin, two of Malaya’s export staples, was burgeoning after the war. But Chin Peng was not a strategist. At best he was a communist ideologue who allowed the fervency of his belief in militant Marxism to frame his conception of operations in Malaya. This was a mistake, as it blinded him to the need to allow a political path to follow, or be aligned with, a strategy of the bullet and bomb. Most successful insurgencies are essentially pragmatic, the bomb and the ballot-box working in tandem. Not so for Chin Peng, who’s idée fixee was that the political structures of Malaya needed to bend to his will, without ideological compromise. He didn’t have the political nous of, for example, the Afghan Taliban, for whom this duality seems to come with mother’s milk.
In the first place, he eschewed meaningful negotiation. He did meet with interlocutors on several occasions, but these conversations were always one-sided. He was never prepared to budge from the purity of ‘his’ way. Talks with the British were seen by him to be another bullet fired from his gun. He used them to demand that they compromise. He never could.
Second, he failed to appreciate the limited attractiveness of his movement to those without his overwhelming belief in the theological purity of Marxism. The major MCP deficiency was that it appealed principally to the minority Chinese population rather than the Malay majority and even within the Chinese community a principal method of garnering support was by means of violence and extortion. These weren’t the soundest grounds for growing a popular insurgent movement.
Third, Chin Peng’s plan to ‘liberate’ entire areas was absurd. The communists never had the resources to do what they hoped, and as a consequence were forced to withdraw deep into the jungles which covered the mountain spine of the country and organise themselves for a campaign of hit-and-run strikes against the government. Here, separated from sources of food and funds, they were forced in time to expend most of their effort in staying alive. It has been estimated that by 1953 ninety per cent of insurgent time was spent in organising food supplies. Security Force tactics over time came to concentrate less on fighting the insurgents and more on identifying, tracking and destroying their bases. Without supplies, sources of food, money and essential commodities the insurgents found themselves being cut off in the jungle where they were faced with the stark alternatives of starvation or surrender.
Fourth, despite being the recipient of British expertise and weapons from SOE during the war, Chin Peng had no real conception of the organisational, intellectual and military capacity of his enemy, or of their ability to design a campaign plan to counter him. The British, despite some early hiccups, ran an exemplary campaign to defeat the insurgency. As early insurgent success was largely due to the unpreparedness of the state to react effectively to terror so the opportunities for insurgent action declined markedly as the security forces expanded in size and effectiveness. The British recognised the essentially political nature of the problem, worked seriously to establish an independent Malayan state, and separated the insurgents from their sources of practical and moral support. As the bulk of these sources were achieved through extortion and intimidation, the New Villages programme, in which several hundreds of thousands of squatters were resettled, was achieved with remarkable levels of support from those being resettled. It was a politically sensitive, expensive and radical approach but it worked, and paid substantial dividends in the long term.
Under the robust leadership of General Sir Gerald Templer in particular, the drive to steer Malaya to self-government acted to deprive the MCP of its raison d'etre. Chin Peng never seemed to appreciate this reality, and offer an alternative political counter. For him, like Lenin, the fight defined the nature of the revolution, even when it had become clear to all other observers that the revolution was now a damp squib, and could never be achieved. The British succeeded in politicising the silent Chinese, Malay and Indian majority and persuaded them that they had an important role in the future of a new, post-colonial Malaya. A citizenship law of 1952 had given Malayan citizenship to some 50% of the Chinese population. A widespread Chinese franchise meant that the Chinese community had something to lose if the insurgents won. When it was announced in 1956 that the Emergency would not hold back Independence, the insurgents lost their claim to be fighting for an independent Malaya. Likewise, a policy of building civil society – not something of course that could be achieved overnight – helped to negate communist claims and propaganda that only socialism would provide a safe and modern society in which all peoples were respected.
It took the British twelve years to defeat Chin Peng’s insurgency, although the end result was clear by 1954. Chin Peng in his ideological blindness could not see it, however, committing his benighted followers to a slow death in the jungles of the Malayan highlands, a fast diminishing – even pathetic – force, irrelevant to the people of Malaya and the future of a country which received its independence from Britain - in July 1957. The abject failure of Chin Peng and his gang to persuade the majority of people that their way was best, and the corresponding ability of the government to win the support of both the Chinese and Malay population, took the initiative away from the communist cause. Locked into his ideological straitjacket, Chin Peng continued to pipe his merry tune – and take all his benighted followers – over the cliff, to the utter destruction of his plans for a ‘socialist’ Malaya. Pathetically, he continued to fight his insurgency to his dying day in 2013, in exile in Thailand where he had lived since 1953, long after the rest of history had passed him by.
Such is the nature of hubris. Its a tragedy that so many had to die as a result.
And yet the sentimentality of his cause, especially among the young, lingered well into the late 20th C. He was the constant 'bogey man' brought out by Singapore's leaders periodically to reign in those opposed to their way.
I’m currently reading ‘The Malayan Emergency: Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire’ (Karl Hack, CUP 2022). So far the insurgents are always on the back foot. I haven’t reached Chin Penguin yet, might cut to the chase.