Mark Curtis, Editor, Declassified UK 1
Economic interests
Political reform
'The vast majority of the poorer Chinese were employed in the tin mines and on the rubber estates and they suffered most from the Japanese occupation of the country ... During the Japanese occupation, they were deprived both of their normal employment and of the opportunity to return to their homeland ... Large numbers of Chinese were forced out of useful employment and had no alternative but to follow the example of other distressed Chinese, who in small numbers had been obliged to scratch for a living in the jungle clearings even before the war' (CO, 1952b).
The reality of the war
'A community of squatters would be surrounded in their huts at dawn, when they were all asleep, forced into lorries and settled in a new village encircled by barbed wire with searchlights round the periphery to prevent movement at night. Before the ‘new villagers’ were let out in the mornings to go to work in the paddy fields, soldiers or police searched them for rice, clothes, weapons or messages. Many complained both that the new villages lacked essential facilities and that they were no more than concentration camps' (Lapping, 1985, p. 223).
'Resettlement' offered further opportunities. One was a pool of cheap labour for employers. Another was that, as a government newsletter said, it could 'educate [the Chinese] into accepting the control of government'. The colonial authorities declared that 'We still have a long way to go in conditioning the [Chinese] to accept policies which can easily be twisted by the opposition to appear as acts of colonial oppression'. But the task was made easier because 'it must always be emphasised that the Chinese mind is schizophrenic and ever subject to the twin stimuli of racialism and self-interest' (CO, 1949 and 1951b).
Collective punishment
Psychological warfare
'The decision to call them ‘bandits’ or ‘terrorists’ was taken originally because of the insurance implications of the words ‘insurgents’ or ‘rebels’ or ‘enemy’… It was only much later when our propaganda machine began to get going in South East Asia that the propaganda angle of the matter was ever considered' (Carruthers, 1995, p. 77).British officials were also keen to avoid any words that might suggest a popular uprising, and always played down the political roots of the rebellion (Bayly and Harper, 2007, p. 436). 'On no account should the term ‘insurgent’, which might suggest a genuine popular uprising, be used', Colonial Office official J. D. Higham stated (Carruthers, 1995, p. 77). In 1952 a defence ministry memorandum stipulated that insurgents—previously usually referred to as bandits—would be officially known as 'communist terrorists' or CTs (CO, 1952g).
Conclusion