Malayan Emergency Research Articles

Voicing the Malayan Emergency: Ventriloquizing Subjectivity in British Colonial Film and Radio

British colonial film and radio broadcasting initiatives are described as a foundational context for shaping the Malayan Emergency (1948–60). The development and deployment of counterinsurgency techniques become a means by which to wage war against what came to be identified as the Communist insurgency, previously trained and allied with Anglo‐American forces against the Japanese occupation from 1942 to 1945. Key British figures associated with propaganda tactics during World War II, such as Hugh Carelton Greene, were instrumental in developing a new array of techniques for postwar propaganda. This article considers the extent to which film and radio programming were elemental to managing popular aspirations for independence just as economic and political authority became increasingly consolidated within the terms of Anglo‐American economic and political interests. It considers how film and media programs contributed to the construction of the “Communist terrorist” by reference to several radio segments and films that were produced during this period. A significant part of the Malayan Emergency was associated with a large‐scale population resettlement program known as the Briggs Plan. It was conceived as an effective population‐centric strategy of political control that relied upon a biopolitics of security that became integral to Cold War political objectives. It is within the terms of a Cold War media complex that this discussion addresses the context for “radio‐cinema governmentality.”

Book Review: The Malayan Emergency: Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire by Karl Hack

Book Review: <i>The Malayan Emergency: Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire</i> by Karl Hack

The New Social History of the Malayan Emergency, 1948–60: Locating and Decentring the State in Malaya’s New Villages

Abstract Tan Teng Phee’s Behind Barbed Wire is an excellent, meticulously researched book that should transform the way scholars understand both the social history, and the historiography, of the Malayan Emergency (1948-60). In this work, Tan sets out in full detail the British colonial state’s rationale for establishing an expansive network of more than five hundred detention camps – or New Villages – under the Emergency’s Briggs Plan. In addition to this important contribution, Tan also explains the gruelling reality of life inside the camps for the 570,000 or more mostly Chinese Malayans whose social, political, and economic roles – and private, internal lives – the state coercively reconstructed inside them. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work on governmentality, and James C. Scott’s work on the hidden transcripts and weapons of the weak, Tan’s book also lays the groundwork for a new wave of work on the Emergency. Thanks to Tan, future scholars are now by far better equipped to examine sensitive questions such as how and why Malayans experienced the Emergency in a racially differentiated manner, and the role the Emergency played in constructing Malaya’s “consociational” politics, creating a specific path to Malayan decolonisation.

Countering radical terrorist ideology through psywar: lessons from the Malayan emergency

ABSTRACT Soon after the events of 9–11, it was recognised that the U.S. and the West had to wage effective information warfare if they were to succeed in countering or containing global terrorism as a result of radical Islamism. The West, however, has failed in this endeavour, epitomised by the contemporary onslaught from the Islamic State’s ideology resulting in the continuation of the global terrorist threat. Yet, lessons drawn from the case study of British success in the Malayan Emergency experience, with the necessary qualifications, are useful in waging information war today against contemporary radical Islamist terrorism. The key lessons for contemporary counter-terrorism include: the need for psywar operations to be accompanied by legal and security measures in consultation with local Muslim communities to contain the enablers of the adversary’s psywar apparatus, establishing better governance over religious schools, enabling local Muslims to lead psywar operations, the use former terrorists in counter-radicalisation, the promotion of inclusion, addressing underlying causes of alienation and paying careful attention to developments in the Middle East.

Beyond diaspora’s horizons: mass deportations to China and an alternative to the diaspora paradigm

ABSTRACT This essay argues for the need to look beyond “diaspora” paradigms of global Chinese historical experience, and that we may need different metaphors in order to do so. Examining the little-known history of the mass deportation of Chinese colonial subjects from Malaya to China during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60), it reflects empirically on why cases like these necessitate more sensitive approaches to global Chinese experiences which resist the language of race, ancestry, lineage, homelands and origins, and attend instead to history and historical processes: to the silences of the archive and hegemonies which produce racial essentialization; to specificities of place, space and scale; and to rupture, immobility and refusal. It calls instead for the discernment of diaspora’s historically constituted horizons—and a historically grounded appreciation of what lies beyond them.

Methods of Memory: Time Travels in the Archives

Abstract In this article, the author critically reflects on her long project One Day We'll Understand, a multichapter research and art work that complicates the historiography of the “Malayan Emergency,” the anticolonial war in the former British colony of Malaya (1948–60)—made in the context of a growing number of art works globally dealing with the ghosts of empire. In charting the project's various parts, the author discusses how she uses art and multiple modes of archiving to conjure the specters of colonialism and traces of resistance and generate a different form of knowledge and remembrance, and how that offers us possible paths of restitution and repair.

Behind Barbed Wire: Chinese New Villages During the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960, written by Teng Phee Tan

Behind Barbed Wire: Chinese New Villages During the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960, written by Teng Phee Tan

Liminality and the End of Empire inThe 7thDawn

This article reassesses the impact of The 7thDawn, a British adventure drama from 1964 about the Malayan Emergency. Using a contextual methodology, it examines the film as a product of the Cold War and against the background of previous British films made about the Emergency. Key to understanding the film is its representation of Malaya as a liminal space undergoing a transition to independence and a reflection of that political and physical state in the leading protagonist as a liminal individual undergoing a psychological transition. Among the contextual issues addressed are how colonialism during a time of transition to Malayan independence is seen through the film’s imagery, how ethnic differences are portrayed and how individual roles came to stand for political ideologies. Through formal textual analysis, the study of biographies, memoirs and original texts, as well as through references to film history, the article asserts that this hitherto neglected film should be seen as reflective of a turning point in the depiction of colonialism and attitudes towards race and ethnicity in English language feature films about South East Asia.

Karl Hack. The Malayan Emergency: Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire. Cambridge Military Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 530. $34.99 (paper).

Karl Hack. The Malayan Emergency: Revolution and Counterinsurgency at the End of Empire. Cambridge Military Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 530. $34.99 (paper). - Volume 62 Issue 2

Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America

Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America

Humanising the Squatter: Photography in the Service of Resettlement in Emergency-era Malaya

This article explores the ways in which photography was used by the colonial state in Malaya to promote the supposed success of resettlement – the counterinsurgency scheme through which around half a million people were forcibly moved into camps, later renamed ‘New Villages’, during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60). While this study engages with the ways in which the racialised category of the ‘squatter’ – that is, rural Chinese who were the main object of resettlement – was reflected in official photography, it also argues for the need to consider such photography within broader developments in photographic practice and consumption in Southeast Asia during the early 1950s. These include the role of local Malayan photographers as part of the state propaganda apparatus and the emergence of Humanist photojournalism as a mode of expression in the same period. In doing this, the article suggests that the interaction between colonial photography and commercial photojournalism in Malaya complicates the extant literature on the ‘colonial gaze’ while contributing to an emerging body of research on the tensions between colonialism and Humanism in early postwar photography.

Unlearning History: Mark Teh and the Spectres of Baling

Held in December 1955, the Baling talks represented a unique attempt to end the Malayan emergency through a negotiated peace between the British colonial government and the Malayan Communist Party, but it also marked the beginning of the Cold War in Asia. This paper focuses on Mark Teh's long-term investigations, as a researcher and theatre director for the Five Arts Centre in Kuala Lumpur, into this historically significant Cold War event and its representation. Teh's performance Baling is examined as an exemplary collaborative project that expands Western definitions of the documentary theatre, while highlighting the continuing efforts of South East Asian artists to contest cultural regionalism and colonial knowledge systems. Drawing on Brechtian aesthetics and postcolonial theory, Teh appropriates diverse forms of politically engaged art in order to question the role of history and the archive in the solidification of nationalist ideologies and identity binaries in the post-war era.

Race, Space, and the Malayan Emergency: Expelling Malay Muslim Communism and Reconstituting Malaya's Racial State, 1945–1954

ABSTRACTThis article analyses the physical and discursive displacement of Malay Muslim advocates of a cosmopolitan and multiracial form of Malayan citizenship from the arena of “legitimate” national politics between the Second World War and the mid-1950s. It discusses the trajectory of the Malayan Left during this period, with a special focus on the work of Abdullah C. D., a Malay Muslim leader of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Abdullah's work included helping to build the Malay Nationalist Party of Malaya (PKMM) under the MCP's United Front strategy from 1945, creating the MCP's Department of Malay Work in 1946, and establishing the Tenth Regiment of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) in 1949. This work was essential to the MCP's outreach to Malay Muslims after Malaya's failed national revolution, which collapsed into racial conflict without achieving independence for the British colony. The Malayan Emergency was declared in 1948, and its military and social campaigns eliminated or displaced the MCP's leadership and much of the MNLA, including Abdullah and the rest of the Tenth Regiment, to Thailand by 1954. Despite his continued engagement with political movements in Malaya, Abdullah's vision for a new politics for Malay Muslims was effectively displaced into the realm of nostalgia. His ideas, outlined in MNLA pamphlets and periodicals like Tauladan (Exemplar), never made significant inroads in Malaya, whose racial state the Emergency re-established, using race to manage the threat to its interests posed by leftist politics.

Spaces of occupation: Colonial enclosure and confinement in British Malaya

This article examines how the geography of foreign occupation changed in British Malaya between 1895 and 1960. In particular, the article reveals how notions related to enclosure and confinement influenced the introduction of new territorial and spatial categories in British Malaya that enclosed the region's landscape and natural environment while simultaneously concentrating the region's diverse population into racially and economically segregated communities in the Malay interior. This geography, crafted during the early colonial period, came to have particular significance in the period following World War Two. At that time, during the so-called Malayan Emergency, the British administration forcibly resettled hundreds of thousands of Malaya's rural inhabitants into highly regulated and repressive state spaces, known as New Villages, White and Black Areas, and Regrouping Areas. Utilizing a mixture of secondary sources, archival materials, and digital mapping technologies, this article shows how the creation of these new Emergency spaces were not novel but were a continuation of longstanding patterns of land control in the colony that remade Malaya's natural environment on a vast scale.

Psychiatric casualties and the British counter-insurgency in Malaya

ABSTRACT The psychiatric cost of Britain’s post-war counter-insurgency campaigns have gone largely un-investigated. Focusing on the Malayan Emergency, this article will show that counter-insurgency operations were sufficiently intense to produce what were conceptualised as cases of mild psychoneurosis. These conditions were managed using convalescence and simple psychotherapy. Managing these conditions in this way risked leaving more serious conditions untreated and meant recorded cases of psychoneurosis were kept artificially low. That the stresses of the counter-insurgency in Malaya were reproduced elsewhere suggests there was a wider psychiatric cost of Britain’s post-war period of decolonisation.

Malayan Chinese women in a time of war: Gender, narration, and subversion in Han Suyin’s And the Rain My Drink

ABSTRACT Set in the Malayan Emergency (1948-60), Han Suyin’s And the Rain My Drink (1956) is important for its portrayal of working-class, rural Malayan Chinese women, one of the most oppressed subaltern groups at the time. Tapping into the gendered structures of imperial history that have silenced the voices of women, especially if they belonged to marginalized ethnic groups and/or the lower social class, the novel’s exploration of women’s wartime experiences through nature and the jungle landscape brings to the fore key issues of colonialism, race, class, and knowledge. Although mistreated, mistranslated, and misunderstood by the British imperialists, colonized Malayan Chinese women nonetheless possess a subversive or revolutionary potential that can threaten the essentializing gaze of the patriarchal empire. More importantly, the gendered narrative of Malayan Chinese women in a time of war sheds light on British colonialism’s fantasies and failures.

Han Suyin and error: Decolonization, knowledge, and literary subjectivity

ABSTRACT This article examines Han Suyin’s fictionalized autobiographies from the 1950s as meditations on the relationship between cognitive error and the global politics of decolonization. Drawing on anti-colonial theories of knowledge, especially those proposed by Mao Zedong, this article develops an account of error as a rhetorical and theoretical problematic in the context of global decolonization. The author argues that error is a recurrent theme in Han Suyin’s work as she navigated the tensions between her subject position and her political commitments during the period when she moved from Hong Kong to Southeast Asia. In A Many-Splendoured Thing, Han reveals the tension between her political commitments and the fragmented nature of geopolitical knowledge. In And the Rain My Drink, she depicts the operations and consequences of error by adopting a more experimental narrative form that registers the psychological damage inflicted by colonial rule during the Malayan Emergency (1948–60).

Emergency politics and the middlebrow novel: A comparative analysis of Han Suyin’s … and the Rain my Drink and Mary McMinnies’s The Flying Fox

ABSTRACT In July 1956, Han Suyin’s novel of the Malayan Emergency was published in London and Singapore. … and the Rain my Drink is a fictional account of the communist insurgency and the British counter-insurgency campaign. What is often overlooked is that earlier that year the British author Mary McMinnies had published her “Emergency” novel The Flying Fox, which covers much of the same political ground as Han’s. This article views Han’s and McMinnies’s work as exemplars of middlebrow fiction. To narrate the end of empire, both texts employ literary devices associated with the middlebrow, alongside exotic imagery familiar from an earlier imperial tradition. Han’s narrative choices acquire, however, distinctive meanings in the Malayan context, associating the exotic with Malaya’s multi-ethnic political landscape, and the domestic tropes of the middlebrow with societal tensions and a newfound Asian confidence, whilst also revealing Asian sensitivities and imported western values.

Shirking the Briggs Plan: Civilian Resistance to Reform and the Army’s Struggle for Control in Malaya, 1950–1952

ABSTRACT Civil–military tensions played a central role shaping the evolution of the British campaign during the Malayan Emergency. While the Briggs Plan has often been described as focusing exclusively on population control, Briggs developed a strategy combining coercive and security measures with wide-reaching administrative and political reforms. However, the reluctance of top members of the Malayan Civil Service to risk a political confrontation with Malay elites, who were deeply opposed to investment and the extension of political rights to the Chinese squatters, led them to resist the political elements of the programme during Briggs’ tenure as director of operations (June 1950-November 1951). Briggs’ lack of executive authority over the civil service, combined with conservative political preferences and the slow pace of administrative and government reform, led to the manifestation of the Briggs Plan as a programme of coercive population control. From mid-1951, the civil–military struggle over campaign strategy transformed into a struggle for control of the Malayan government. The new Conservative government’s decision to appoint General Templer high commissioner in late 1951 represented a victory for the officers, over civilian resistance. At the same time, singularly crediting Templer overlooks important political successes achieved by Briggs and Templer’s predecessor, High Commissioner Gurney.

The What-Has-Been and the Now of a Communist Past in Malaya in the Films of Amir Muhammad

This article considers two films by the Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad, The Last Communist of 2006 and the Village People Radio Show of 2007. Both films are focused on the Malayan Emergency and the lives of a small group of Malayan communists. Through an engagement with Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller,” the analysis in this article examines the aesthetic forms that structure Amir’s films, namely nonlinear narratives, intertextuality, and the use of images and stories as comparative frames. This article argues that Amir’s films enable audiences to recognize how the truth of a communist past in Malaysia, both of its politics and suppression, inflects the present. The films provide an opening to recognize how the absence of communism today is the effect of the ideological clearing of all leftism that became the hallmark of the end of the British Empire in Malaysia. Communism is made meaningful in Amir’s films both as a lived experience and as a displacement that is absent from the postcolonial everyday.