‘Like a Concentration Camp, lah’

May 28, 2021 8:53 PM

Chinese Grassroots Experience of the Emergency and New Villages in British Colonial Malaya. The British anti-communist operation in Malaya is considered an archetypal COIN campaign and the first modern counterinsurgency. The Emergency, which lasted until 1960, involved the forced relocation of 573,000 rural inhabitants into 480 New Villages. Sixty years on, 450 of these villages, with over 82 percent Chinese inhabitants, still exist in Malaysia. In this study, Teng-Phee Tan visits 150 New Villages and conducts 76 interviews with elderly informants on their personal accounts of the Emergency.

In "bad" areas, security forces would raid at dawn, to prevent squatters from fleeing, and their crops and houses would be burned. Houses were painted by number, and each household taken to a different New Village to break up their community. Family separations were common.

These New Villages were ringed by barbed wire and watchtowers with floodlights. Security forces had shoot to kill powers they could use on people found outside the fence after curfew. "Operation Starvation" mandated that each household was given a ration card to control the number of calories they were allowed to receive, and villagers were subjected to body searches to prevent them smuggling food to the communists. Agent Orange was first used in 1950s Malaya to defoliate large areas of jungle and crops as a food denial strategy to starve out the communists, eventually forcing them to surrender.

posted by xdvesper (20 comments total)

"Effective" counter-insurgency tactics seem more relevant than ever, these days, and I thought this was a fascinating bit of history that is not well known outside of Malaysia, and conversely, completely sanitized within Malaysia.

My grandparents passed away over a decade ago. As people who lived through the war, they either didn't didn't like talking about it, or they figured that it was something the younger generation wasn't interested in hearing about. The Japanese carried out Sook Ching - the ethnic cleansing of the Chinese in Malaya. My grandmother had to cut her hair short and pose as boy to avoid being taken as a sex slave. After the British regained power, the ethnic Chinese were the subject of the Emergency and internment camps: after the establishment of Malaysia, the Chinese were the subject of the May 13 incident, the mass slaughter of minority ethnic Chinese.

The Emergency seems to have parallels to Afghanistan - the communist insurgency that the British fought in the Emergency, was initially cultivated and supplied by the British themselves as a tool to fight against the Japanese occupation during WW2 a decade earlier.

And lastly, there's speculation that the forced urbanization and granting of land titles in what became future urban centers dramatically improved the economic position of the poorest segment of the minority ethnic Chinese - one quarter of the total ethnic Chinese population - further cementing their economic dominance over the majority Malays.
posted by xdvesper at 8:54 PM on May 28, 2021 [12 favorites]

There was such a village in Gua Musang, where I lived for a couple of years. The boundaries were still very clear from the square layout of the Chinese district, now full of nice homes.
posted by Meatbomb at 9:26 PM on May 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

Thank you for posting this. It’s definitely not well known outside Malaysia. I would like to learn more about the history of that country because my grandfather was born in British Colonial Malaya, and we still have family in Malaysia, though I don’t really know them. Since since my mom was born in Singapore, I’m more familiar with the history of that country. I’ll have to ask my her what she knows about these villages.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 9:57 PM on May 28, 2021

In fact Meatbomb the paper mentions that village. There's a photo of the village on page 224.
posted by awfurby at 9:59 PM on May 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

I worked on a book project about relocation villages in Malaysia for an ethnic group due to WWII but not directly by the Japanese, written with survivor accounts. I'm being vague because it was a passion project by family of deceased survivors and not someone with historical training or in some sense, emotional distance - a valuable collection of primary sources, but not a proper historical study. I did a light edit and proofread, and there were so many gaps that were just horrifying to read, because of the implications of widespread physical and sexual abuse in code and hints, and the trauma of illness and death rates and so on, together with a very deep "we never talk about that" code among the survivors. The people working on the project were family relations one or two generations out and not able to think about the very mild questions I asked because it was still traumatic.

I grew up in British army quarters but I think the first time I ever heard about British military atrocities in SEAsia was as a teenager in novels talking obliquely about the trauma suffered by British soldiers who 'had' to carry out these missions, compared to what I was told/taught about Japanese war crimes. I still can't off the top of my head think of anything outside of academic history books that deals with British-army trauma compared to plenty of popular novels and films on Japanese-army trauma - the overwhelming colonial (and language) washing of massacres.

If someone can recommend any books that are not written as pro-British, I'd be very interested. It's a huge gap, the way anything that touches on communism in SEA is.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 10:15 PM on May 28, 2021 [10 favorites]

That tactic spread to other Western-sponsored anti-Communist conflicts throughout Southeast Asia; can't help but think of "strategic hamletting" that was commonplace in South Vietnam and the Philippines. (In the latter, it's still a very real possibility today.)
posted by micketymoc at 10:31 PM on May 28, 2021 [3 favorites]

Thank you for this xdvesper and others with links - so many unspeakable atrocities.
posted by esoteric things at 10:39 PM on May 28, 2021

That tactic spread to other Western-sponsored anti-Communist conflicts throughout Southeast Asia

Yeah, it's one of the horrendous gifts we've provided for counterterrorism texts. And much of what the British did, independent Malaysia maintained and continued, including the Internal Security Act, which provided for 'preventative detention' which, when the PATRIOT Act and the UK anti-terrorism bill came out, gave plenty of fodder to our right-wing to justify its existence (it's technically gone now, but replaced by another piece of law that is only minimally better).

These 'new villages' only have caused untold misery not only in making explicit the racial profiling that modern Malaysia still continues to use (Indonesia as well) but also the forced relocation certainly led to a major economic depression for the communities in question.
posted by cendawanita at 4:31 AM on May 29, 2021 [3 favorites]

I was once in a lovely pub in Leamington Spa, having a quiet pint with my parents who had come over from Ireland to visit me, when we got chatting to an old man with a dog who was sitting at the bar.

He was quite excited when he found out we were from Northern Ireland and started telling us about briefly serving there in the British Army, cue us nodding and politely smiling. His service in NI was apparently pretty uneventful, thankfully, but then he thought it was important to tell us about his time working on counter insurgency in Malaya. He started going into fairly graphic detail about what he and his unit had done there, I think it was some kind of bizarre trauma response, but I had to step up and say "enough".

Utterly grim.
posted by knapah at 4:54 AM on May 29, 2021 [7 favorites]

Partition, starvation, and forced migration:key strategies in the playbook of British empire
posted by Morpeth at 6:22 AM on May 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

Pretty much anything the NATO powers accused the Soviet Bloc of doing, they were also doing.

- Forced relocations in Malaya and Vietnam
- Suppression of ethnic minorities in Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco
- Establishment of puppet governments in Central America, West Africa, and South-East Asia
- Literal concentration camps in Kenya
- Mass surveillance, secret police, and routine use of informants in Northern Ireland

That's not to say the Soviet Bloc wasn't doing those things, just that the Western powers' hands are by no means clean.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 10:18 AM on May 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

The cause/effect chain is really astounding when presented like this. Everything is the way it is for a reason.

All I'd known previously was from the Alan Cumming episode of Who Do You Think You Are? His grandfather, still traumatized from WW2, re-enlisted in the late 40s to work as a police officer in Malaya. The program touches on the horror of the counter insurgency going on outside “town” but doesn't mention forced relocations. I can’t find a full version online right now (unless you're in the UK) but it's worth watching if you can find it.
posted by bonobothegreat at 3:02 PM on May 29, 2021

That's not to say the Soviet Bloc wasn't doing those things, just that the Western powers' hands are by no means clean.

An important dynamic in the Cold War was the way in which each side's atrocities were used by the other side to justify their own.
posted by AdamCSnider at 3:20 PM on May 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

- Literal concentration camps in Kenya
posted by TheWhiteSkull

The New Villages were, literally, concentration camps too: they "concentrated" the allegedly communist supporting rural Chinese into militarily controlled camps.

British-written history congratulates themselves on winning the hearts and minds of these villagers by providing them with land titles and modern conveniences such as running water, sewerage infrastructure, education and healthcare - citing that as a key factor in their victory over the communists - winning with infrastructure rather than engaging in a shooting war. It is also "commonly" accepted that these rural Chinese were placed into these villages for their own protection from the communists, who would raid the villages for food.

History is written by the winners: many urban Chinese (the "good" ones, of high status, not the "bad" communist supporting rural ones) have nothing but admiration for the British and their longstanding institutions - missionary schools, hospitals, all the foundations of modern life - and in some cases preferring British rule over self rule. Hence why I thought this study was interesting. Even through the interview notes, you can sense a current of pragmatism running through it: yes the British did bad things, but they were vastly preferable to the Japanese during WW2, and a strong authoritarian government is preferable to anarchy. Culture is built up over hundreds of years of history: perhaps this is similar in vein to how so many mainland Chinese approve of authoritarian governments too.

Some of this goes some way to explaining the fortress mentality of the ethnic Chinese minority - wherever they go in the world - and how the background and worldview of ethnic Chinese minorities differs so greatly to mainland Chinese - and also how the segregation and demonization of minorities nearly 70 years ago still has repercussions today. And what makes this complex is that there's a huge intersectionality in privilege - the ethnic Chinese minority in Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia are very privileged socioeconomically - one often quoted figure is that the 25% ethnic Chinese minority pay 90% of the income taxes in Malaysia.
posted by xdvesper at 8:40 PM on May 29, 2021 [4 favorites]

And what makes this complex is that there's a huge intersectionality in privilege - the ethnic Chinese minority in Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia are very privileged socioeconomically - one often quoted figure is that the 25% ethnic Chinese minority pay 90% of the income taxes in Malaysia.

yup, that's something the right-wing ethnonationalists love to bandy about for sure, but i'll note the overlap between the 'privileged' chinese and those generationally impacted by the relocation isn't that much. the chinese that were forced into these new villages are also looked down by the privileged, because often not only aren't they urban chinese, they were from the agriculture stock and lower-class, and in very specific class marker ways, not anglophonic. and only in newer generations are they even mandarin-speaking, so not even the 'correct' kind of sinophones. but still, 'all chinese are rich you know' is somehow a given, and a justification.
posted by cendawanita at 8:52 PM on May 29, 2021 [2 favorites]

and i need to add, the racial profiling the British introduced went ahead with a level of complicity from the Malay elites, who were themselves, post-WW2, were also under threat by left-wing Malay politicians-- in fact the freedom resistance that were made up by the communists were multi-racial, and Malay communists still live in China now just like their other Malayan counterparts, when they were trying to escape the reprisals from the colonial government. But it was bloody convenient to just paint that all Chinese are communists. (this is sliiightly different from the Singapore experience, when it's was more clearly anglophonic vs sinophonic Chinese but along the same lines of collusion).
posted by cendawanita at 8:59 PM on May 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

As far as Singapore goes, there's an argument that the current party in power (PAP) has set up a narrative where it has effectively inherited the authority of the British colonial masters. As such, our colonial history is always talked about positively; even just a few years ago ministers were saying how in Singapore's case, being colonised by the British was a good thing.
posted by destrius at 11:31 PM on May 29, 2021 [1 favorite]

Isn't that LKY's legacy though?
posted by infini at 2:28 AM on May 30, 2021

there's a huge intersectionality in privilege - the ethnic Chinese minority in Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia are very privileged socioeconomically - one often quoted figure is that the 25% ethnic Chinese minority pay 90% of the income taxes in Malaysia

Meh, look I am an outsider but I lived there a few years and have a few close people there. Malaysian ethnic politics is such bullshit, with all sorts of perks and affirmative action programs for the dominant majority. Chinese and Indian Malays of 4th generation or more, without the same rights as the Malays. Religious laws that mean mixed marriages are gradually Islamising the minority groups. Singapore getting disinvited from Malaysia to keep the ethnic balance right.

What happened in Indonesia in the 70s could easily happen in Malaysia, the Malays are stoked up to be entitled and made out as the victims of Chinese and Indian economic power.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:33 AM on May 30, 2021

Isn't that LKY's legacy though?

The legacy of forming an independent nation? I find that the rhetoric tends to focus more on the trauma of separation from Malaysia (I think we're the only country that keeps showing their founding leader crying on independence day), and a lot less on the process by which we got rid of the British. We don't even celebrate or even remember the day we stopped being a colony (16 Sep 1963).

[Sorry for the derail into Singapore history/politics! Let's get back to talking about Malaya]
posted by destrius at 8:38 AM on May 30, 2021 [1 favorite]