Chin Peng
Chin Peng, born Ong Boon Hua,
Chin was born into a middle-class family in Sitiawan, now a part of Perak. In 1939, at the age of 15, he became a revolutionary and fled to Kuala Lumpur in 1940. He joined the CPM in 1941, and quickly involved himself in local party committees and labour unions in Perak. Throughout the Second World War, Chin fought as an anti-colonialist guerrilla in the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army against the Japanese occupation of Malaya, allying with Force 136, a British-funded covert resistance movement in Asia. He was subsequently awarded the Order of the British Empire.
As the most senior surviving member of the CPM to emerge from the war, he founded the MNLA and between 1948 and 1960 engaged in an unsuccessful war to win independence for Malaya from the British Empire. His actions led to the revocation of his OBE by Britain. After Britain agreed to give Malaya independence and the CPM decided to demobilise, Chin went into exile in China, then Thailand, and waged a second guerrilla campaign between 1968 and 1989 against the now independent Malaysian government. This campaign did not succeed, and ended with a final peace agreement in 1989, which dissolved the CPM permanently. He was however not permitted to return, and Chin died in exile in Bangkok, Thailand in 2013; he was 88.
Chin is a controversial political figure in Malaysia. His detractors condemned him and the MNLA for committing numerous atrocities during the Emergency, and characterised him as an ideological fanatic and terrorist. He was credited for contributing towards the Malayan independence process, and was seen as a prominent rebel leader and anti-imperialist against British colonialism in Malaya. He was the last surviving postwar revolutionary leader to have successfully fought for independence from colonialism in Asia.
Early life
Youth years
Chin Peng was born Ong Boon Hua on 21 October 1924 into a middle-class family in the small seaside town of Sitiawan, Dindings, which at the time was a part of the Straits Settlements. His ancestral home was in Fuqing, Fujian, China. His father went to live in Sitiawan in 1920, and set up a bicycle, tire, and spare motor parts business with the help of a relative from Singapore, known as Ong Lock Cho.Chin Peng attended a Chinese language school in Sitiawan. In 1937 he joined the Chinese Anti Enemy Backing Up Society, formed that year to send aid to China in response to Japan's aggression. According to Chin and Hack, he was not a communist then. He was in charge of anti-Japanese activities at his school, and was reportedly a supporter of Sun Yat-sen.
First participation in communism
By early 1939, Chin had embraced communism. He planned to go to Yan'an, the renowned communist base in China but was persuaded to remain in Malaya and take on heavier responsibilities in the newly formed Malayan Communist Party.In late 1939, when Chin Peng was in the 4th year of his secondary school education, his school announced that the senior middle section was to be closed due to lack of funds. He decided to continue his education in the Methodist-run Anglo-Chinese Continuation School, which operated in English, because it provided a good cover for his underground activities. He did not want to have to move to Singapore to continue with his education in Chinese. He left the school "for fear of British harassment" after just 6 months. He was now focused fully on his political activities and became, from that point on, a full-time revolutionary. In January 1940 he was put in charge of three anti-Japanese organisations that were targeting students, teachers, members of cultural activities, and general labourers. At the end of January 1940, he was admitted to the Malayan Communist Party as a member.
Early revolutionary activity
Harassment by the authorities led him to leave his home town for Kuala Kangsar in July 1940. Later he spent a month in Taiping. In September 1940 the party posted him to Ipoh as a standing committee member for Perak. In December he attained full party membership.In early 1941 AEBUS was dissolved. Chin Peng became Ipoh District committee member of the party. "He led student underground cells of three Chinese secondary schools and the Party's organisations of the shop assistants, domestic servants of European families, workers at brick kilns and barbers."
In June 1941 he became a member of the Perak State Committee.
Second World War
Chin Peng rose to prominence during World War II when many Chinese Malayans took to the jungle to fight a guerrilla war against the Japanese. These fighters, inspired by the example of the Chinese Communist Party, became known as the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army. Chin Peng became the liaison officer between the MPAJA and the British military in Southeast Asia.The Japanese invasion of Malaya began in December 1941. In 1942 Chin was the youngest of three members of the Secretariat of the Perak State Committee: Su Yew Meng was secretary and Chang Meng Ching was the other member. In early 1943 the two senior members were captured by the Japanese, which left Chin Peng in charge. Contact with the Party's Central Committee had been lost; he attempted to re-establish it, travelling to Kuala Lumpur and meeting Chai Ker Meng. Later, party leader Lai Tek sent another Central Committee member, Lee Siow Peng, to replace Chin as State Secretary. However, Lee Siow Peng was captured not long after while travelling to a meeting that was to be held in Singapore.
Thus the job of establishing contact with the British commando Force 136 fell to Chin Peng. The first party of that force, consisting of Captain John Davis and five Chinese agents had landed in Malaya on 24 May 1943, by submarine. Chin Peng made contact with the group on 30 September 1943. He was active in his support for the British stay-behind troops but had no illusions about their failure to protect Malaya against the Japanese. In the course of this activity, he came into contact with Freddie Spencer Chapman, who called him a 'true friend' in his Malayan jungle memoir, The Jungle Is Neutral.
In recognition of his service during the war, Chin was awarded an Order of the British Empire , a mention in despatches and two campaign medals by Britain. He was elected the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Malaya after the previous leader Lai Tek, had turned out to be an agent for both the British and the Japanese and had denounced the leadership of the party to the Japanese secret police. Chin Peng was the most senior surviving member.
Before the Emergency
In 1948, the Federation of Malaya plan replaced the Malayan Union plan, frustrating the CPM as they felt the plan was undemocratic and biased towards the Malay elites. They accused the British of forcing idea of federation on people by portraying it as a constitutional solution to Malaya's crisis. According to Chin, the central committee still adhered to Lai Teck's peace struggle strategy in facing the federation, as they thought that the people of Malaya were still recovering from the horrors of the Japanese occupation. To launch an armed rebellion so soon would not only cause them to lose support of the masses but would also drive the already wary Malays to openly resist them.Some scholars allege that the CPM received secret directives from Moscow agents on the methods and timing for a near-simultaneous uprising against colonial authorities during the Southeast Asian Youth Conference held in Calcutta on 19 February 1948 which eventually caused the CPM's insurrection. Chin denied it, stating that the conference argued against such a move. Lance Sharkey, party secretary of the Australian Communist Party, informed Chin and the central committee of the conference's decision while stopping over in Singapore on his way home. In March 1948, the central committees were discussing new policies as the labour strikes were not bringing the results that they hoped for. Chin Peng estimated it would be a year or two before the British took actions against the CPM, leaving them ample time to prepare for a guerrilla war.
On 12 June 1948, the colonial government outlawed the burgeoning trade union federations amid rising tensions. Since then, there was no reduction in the level of violent activities, other than the neutralisation of trade unions. Political murders of informers, anyone found to be working against the labour movement or the CPM, non-Europeans considered enemies to the communist cause or strike-breakers who used thugs and gangsters to harass protesters rose. The murder of three Kuomintang leaders in Johor on 12 June had convinced the British that the communists were escalating the conflict in retaliation for outlawing the trade unions, while in the CPM's eyes these murders were just purely acts of intimidation. Chin again claimed that he was not aware of the murders at the time, although he approved of the later killing of the plantation managers who he claimed were harsh and cruel towards farmworkers.
Leadership of the Malayan Communist Party
The Emergency (1948–1989)
On 16 June 1948, three European plantation managers were murdered in Sungai Siput, which has generally been identified as the incident which caused the Malayan colonial administration to declare a state of emergency. Rather, Sze-Chieh Ng argued these murders were merely the final catalyst for a long-brewing crisis that had been going on since the trade unions began agitating in 1945. Historian Anthony Short feels that this was more of a panic reaction than a carefully considered move. According to him, the government had been powerless to deal with the unrest plaguing Malaya since 1945. According to Purcell's viewpoint, the Emergency was declared in response to increasing incidents of violence and lawlessness.Many Singaporean historians and anti-communists allege that Chin Peng ordered the killings. Chin claimed he had no prior knowledge of the plot. He added that he barely escaped arrest, losing his passport in the process, and he lost touch with the party for a couple of days. Chin became the most wanted man of the British government, with the government offering a reward of $250,000 for his capture. On 17 July 1948, CPM offices in Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, Singapore, and other major cities were raided, followed by mass arrests of suspected communists and anti-government individuals on 21 July. The CPM was banned in July 1948.
In response to the Emergency and the mass arrests of its members, the CPM issued a call to its members to revive its disbanded wartime resistance army, the MPAJA, to take up arms again and escape to the jungles. Since late May and early June the communists had been secretly setting up platoons in several states in preparation for an expected British crackdown in September. The sudden declaration of the Emergency in June, however, forced the MCP to hasten its plan, and they appealed to comrades and volunteers to join them in the struggle. The new guerrilla army, now known as the Malayan National Liberation Army, spent the first year of the Emergency reconsolidating and rearming.
At that time, the CPM was in chaos. Its members were dispersed in the jungle and operated without any command structure or central leadership. According to Chin, attacks were being carried out without his approval or knowledge and there was no coordination among units. The guerrillas endured heavy casualties and made few or no strategic gains in the early months. Chin was desperate to assert control over the MNLA, which had been operating independently since June. It was not until August that some form of central authority was finally set up in the Cameron Highlands, with Chin ordering the guerrillas to adopt Mao Zedong's strategy of establishing liberated zones whenever they drove British forces from an area. However, this strategy failed. British forces continued to hound the guerrillas, who were often forced to retreat deeper into the jungles and disperse into smaller units due to difficulties in resupplying and the risk of larger units being detected and annihilated by British patrols.
Furthermore, the CPM was losing civilian support, and lacking material assistance and intelligence, the party suffered. Chin admitted they had wrongly assumed that the people would be willing support his men, as they had done during World War II. When that failed to happen, they resorted to force to satisfy their needs.
The CPM and MNLA also suffered under British propaganda, which labelled them "bandits" and "communist terrorists". Old suspicions and assumptions that the CPM had clandestine support from either the CCP or the Soviet Union had, over time, hardened into certainty. Records disclosed after the Cold War ended disproved the claim, revealing that the CPM had not sought external support and that no agents from either China or the Soviet Union had even made contact with them. The only 'support' Chin recalled obtaining was the encouraging news that Mao's guerrillas had defeated Chiang Kai-shek's well-equipped and numerically superior KMT army in 1949.