Dr Cheah Boon Kheng

Abstract

Dr Cheah Boon Kheng, historian, and a member of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (JSEAS) Honorary Advisory Board, passed away peacefully on Monday afternoon, 27 July 2015, at the age of 76, after a year-long battle with cancer. Born on 24 July 1939, Dr Cheah started work in 1956 as a journalist with the Straits Times in Singapore, where he remained for 12 years. In 1967, age 28, he embarked on his tertiary studies, reading History and English Literature at the University of Malaya (UM). His tutor at UM, Dr Lee Kam Hing, recalled how Dr Cheah not only had the instinct of a good reporter to recognise what subject was important to pursue but also possessed the maturity, skill, and experience to write well. 'His style of writing was readable and done very often on short notice,' Dr Lee remembered. After obtaining his B.A. (Hons) in 1970, Dr Cheah resumed his career in journalism, this time with the Straits Times in Kuala Lumpur, but stayed only for three years. His interest was increasingly drawn to academia and he started to tutor for the History Department at UM (1971-1973) while still working as a journalist. In 1973, he became a full-time student once more to pursue his Master of Arts degree. In fulfilment of his M.A., which he obtained in 1974, Dr Cheah wrote an excellent thesis on 'The Malayan Democratic Union 1945-1948', a riveting study of the first political party to be established in post-Second World War Singapore. A revised version was subsequently published in 1979 as The masked comrades: A study of the Communist United Front in Malaya, 1945-48, Dr Cheah's first book. After a brief stint as an assistant lecturer at the History Department in UM (1973-1975), Dr Cheah embarked on his doctoral programme on a research scholarship at the Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, under the supervision of Dr Anthony Reid and Dr David Marr in 1975, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1979. In 1978, he joined the History Department, School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Penang, and continued to serve there until his retirement in 1994. He was promoted to associate professor in 1984 and professor in 1990. During his academic career, Dr Cheah also held fellowships at Yale University--as Visiting Pulbright Research fellow at the Council on Southeast Asian Studies between 1984 and 1985 and Visiting Fellow at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies from 1989 to 1990. An authority on Malayan communism and Malaysian history and historiography, Dr Cheah has written and edited some 19 books, including his groundbreaking Red Star over Malaya: Resistance and Social Conflict during and after the Japanese Occupation, 1941-1946, now in its fourth edition, a definitive account of resistance and inter-communal relations in Malaya during the final stages of the Japanese Occupation and its aftermath. Based on a revised version of his doctoral thesis, Dr Cheah's absorbing and insightful study, first published in 1983, remains a must-read for an understanding of Malaysian politics and society. As JSEAS reviewer Dr Yeo Kim Wah put it, 'The prose is concise and smooth-flowing, the research wide-ranging and thorough, the factual foundation well-grounded and firm, the analysis fully-documented and of a very high standard.' J.M. Gullick called it 'an excellent and authoritative work'. Whilst Dr Cheah was trained to write political history in the Rankean tradition, his curiosity as a scholar steered him to venture into other fields of history as well, and to employ other methodologies, as evinced by the publication of his 1988 book, The peasant robbers of Kedah, 1900-1929: Historical and folk perceptions, a pioneering attempt to write a social history of rural Kedah 'from below' utilising the tools of social theory. Dr Cheah's prodigious output extended not just to the production of monographs but also to the 50 or so essays he contributed as chapters in books, articles in journals, including several in JSEAS, and in numerous other scholarly platforms. …