Chinese New Villages of the Malayan Emergency, A Generation Later A Case Study

Abstract

Between 1950 and 1952 the British Military Administration of Malaya undertook the relocation of some half a million rural Chinese into some five hundred fenced and curfewed as part of its counter-offensive against the communist insurgency. Almost one in four of the Chinese of Malaya, and one in ten of the entire population, were involved in resettlement. Though the new villages received some notoriety in the war literature of the Emergency and were the focus of more serious studies in the 1960s, they have not been singled out for much scholarly attention in recent years.1 Nonetheless, an understanding of the new villages today has both historical and contemporary value. The origins of these villages set them apart from natural communities; some of their successes and problems a generation later may prove instructive to planners cur rently developing resettlement programmes of other sorts. Moreover, since there is a widely held notion in the public mind in Malaysia that new villages are communities of a particular sort, there is value in examining the nature of their particularity, if indeed such exists. In its survey of income and poverty levels set forth in the Third Malaysia Plan (1976-1980), the Malaysian Government chose to treat villagers as an economic category, comparing them directly with such groups as padi farmers and fishermen. Most of the new villages, however, display considerable economic heterogeneity, which grows out of the process of relocation itself and has been further exacerbated by the complex interaction of natural demographic and economic forces. The common wisdom holds that the new villages, and other semi-rural communities like them, are dying slow social and economic deaths, as their youth leave to seek work in the cities. But for many of these departing workers the separation from family and home community may prove to be only temporary; many are involved in a pattern of circulating wage labour in which workers drawn off into the national economy remit earnings and move with varying regularity 126