Before answering the question I’d like to clear up three misconceptions:

• The government of Malaya was no puppet to the British. The British had hoped that a multi-ethnic party like the Independence of Malaya Party would win the early municipal elections of 1952 and 1953. Instead, voting still proceeded along racial lines, resulting in the victory of a coalition of parties, each of which appealed to a different race. The British accepted the results and worked with the victorious coalition anyway.
• The brutality seen during the Malayan Emergency was really incomparable to that seen during the Vietnam War. I don’t want to get into comparing how many people were killed and how painfully, but suffice to say the Emergency is studied as an example of how to defeat an insurgency by winning over ‘hearts and minds’, while the Vietnam War is studied as the exact opposite.
• Very few Chinese were wealthy merchants. The vast majority of Chinese in Malaya were ‘working class’, many of whom hoped to make enough money to support their families in China, while also saving up to hopefully go home for good. There were indeed wealthy Chinese merchants, but there were also wealthy merchants of other races.

Now on to the question proper:

CHINESE AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MALAYAN COMMUNISM (1920-1942)

Communist thought first reached Malaya in the early 1920s, and at this time, Malayan society was extremely fragmented. There were three main races - Malays, who were indigenous and made up roughly 50% of the population, and Chinese (40%) and Indians (10%), who were mostly immigrants. The three races had limited contact with each other. For example, civil service positions were reserved exclusively for Malays, a deliberate British policy to allow Malays to administer their own land. Malays were also spread across Malaya as fishermen and farmers. Tin mine labour, on the other hand, was almost exclusively Chinese, which led to Chinese congregating around mining towns. Plantation labour had at one point been composed entirely of Chinese as well, but they were increasingly being replaced by cheaper labour from India.

Serious divisions existed within the 3 races as well. The Malays did not think of themselves as Malayans, rather, each owed his or her loyalty to one of the 9 sultans, each of whom still nominally ruled his state. The Chinese spoke a variety of mutually unintelligible dialects, depending on which province they had come from, and each dialect group tended to dominate in particular professions. The same was true for the Indians, though they were comparatively small in number. The majority were rubber plantation workers from Tamil Nadu, however there were also money-lenders from Tamil Nadu, merchants from the northern Coromandel Coast, policemen, security guards and businessmen from Punjab and so forth.

Thus, organisations that appealed to just one ethnicity, or to a slice of one ethnicity, were common. When communists arrived in Malaya to ‘spread the word’, they found that there were only 2 ethnicities they could realistically communicate with.

The first was the Malays. Singapore, the administrative centre of Malaya, increasingly became an important centre for communists from the Dutch East Indies during the 1920s. The first of these to visit Singapore was a Javanese named Semaun, president of the PKI (Perserikaten Kommunist di India, Communist Party of the Indies) in 1922. We also have a record of one Sutan Perpateh travelling to Kedah and northern Perak to recruit Malay members in 1926.

However, it was difficult to recruit Malays to the communist cause, as can be seen from the experience of Tan Malaka, the Comintern agent for Southeast Asia.

Malaka spent several months in Singapore and Penang in 1925, trying to spread communism. Despite him and his Javanese colleagues being able to speak Malay, they were unable to make much progress with the Malay community. Eventually, Malaka threw up his hands and labelled the Malays ‘lazy and contented’, and concluded that ‘the only hope lay with the Chinese’ as they understood economics and politics and were dynamic in all fields.

By then, communism had already taken root amongst the Malayan Chinese (more accurately, amongst one particular dialect group, as we will see). Beginning in 1921, the first batch of Chinese communists from the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) arrived in Malaya. An examination of their actions to successfully make inroads among the Malayan Chinese can help explain why converting the Malay community was so much more difficult.

In 1922, CCP agent Tung Fang-Cheng from Hubei arrived to become the headmaster of Chung Hwa School, a Chinese school, near Kuala Lumpur. This school was typical of Chinese schools in Malaya, in that it was a private school that was not funded by the colonial government. Thus, the school could operate as it pleased, and thus Tung was able to use Chung Hwa to hire Chinese communists as teachers without the knowledge of the British. The situation with Malay schools was quite different, with the British having oversight of Malay vernacular schools.

Tung and his colleagues were not only able to influence students in Chung Hwa through their teaching, they were also able to found two night schools, the Pheng Man Night School and the Nan Ming Night School. These provided an education, including in Mandarin, to workers who wished to improve themselves. These schools provided a way to disseminate communism among the students.

These two schools were highly effective as Chinese tended to congregate near places of employment such as mines and urban areas. Dissemination in these areas of high population density was easy and rapid. A large proportion of Malays, in contrast, were spread out in rural areas.

Despite the apparent success of communism among the Malayan Chinese, looking closer we realise that the vast majority of converts belonged to one dialect group - the Hainanese.

The Hainanese were the least numerous among the major dialect groups in Malay, making up just 6% of the Malayan Chinese population. The British regarded them as ‘clannish’ and having an ‘undoubted gift for organisation’ - being so few in number, they kept to themselves, fiercely supporting each other.

As the latest dialect group to arrive in Malaya, they were the least settled. With every generation, more and more members of the other dialect groups had settled in Malaya, sending for wives from China, marrying and having children. Malays were even more settled, having grown up in local communities. Hainanese women, however, had barely begun emigrating. Hainanese labourers thus had more time for themselves and for activism.

As late arrivals in Malaya, the Hainanese also found that the most lucrative professions had already been taken by the other dialect groups. When a Cantonese carpenter needed to take on help, for example, he was likely to write to his family in Guangdong and request that a fellow Cantonese villager make the journey to become his assistant. Hainanese thus occupied lowly occupations in Malaya, including cooks and domestic servants. Desiring to improve their status, the Hainanese were big fans of night schools, which, as we’ve seen, served as vehicles for the spread of communism.

Thus, in the 1920s, the Malayan communist movement was led by mainland and Malayan Chinese, and drew strong support from the Hainanese community. It thus found great success in championing the rights of Chinese, especially Hainanese, workers, organising a series of strikes for better pay and working conditions. At the same time, since there really was no such thing as a ‘Malayan identity’ yet, and since the Malayan Chinese identified strongly as Chinese (including many who had been born in Malaya and had never seen China), the communist movement in Malaya also found it necessary to champion mainland Chinese causes.

For example, after a clash between the Japanese army and Chiang Kai-Shek’s National Revolutionary Army in 1928, it became stridently anti-Japanese, organising a series of anti-Japanese boycotts. A year earlier, Chiang had initiated the Shanghai Massacre, a violent suppression of the CCP, yet the communists in Malaya were sensitive to heightened Chinese nationalism and chose to capitalise on that, as opposed to focusing on their political rivals. When the Japanese attacked Manchuria in 1937, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was again at the forefront of organising very visible anti-Japanese boycotts, positioning itself as a party of Chinese nationalism, something that had originally been the domain of the KMT.

This focus on Chinese issues helped broaden the MCP’s appeal to include Chinese from other dialect groups but it also alienated the other races. By the time of the Japanese Occupation of Malaya in 1942, despite efforts to broaden its base, the MCP was known as a Chinese party with Chinese concerns.

(Continued in reply)