“Malayanization” and the China Threat

By the late 1940s, Britain could claim a long legacy of studying and governing “the Chinese” in its colonial possessions, a tradition that was revived in the postwar years with the reinstatement of organizations such as the Secretariats of Chinese Affairs in Singapore and Malaya (Leow Reference Leow2016, 145–46). Indeed, prior to World War II, colonial authorities had spent considerable time and effort controlling the circulation of ideas and institutions of Chinese origin in British Southeast Asia in particular (cf. Yong and McKenna Reference Yong and McKenna1990). Given such depth of knowledge, it is perhaps surprising that imperial responses to mainland Chinese cultural influence in the postwar years were neither consistent nor coherent across the British Empire. This was certainly the case following the outbreak of the Malayan Emergency in 1948 and in the context of an ongoing civil war in China, when attitudes towards the circulation of Chinese-language media began to diverge.

In Malaya, an insurgency led primarily by ethnic Chinese communists in the MCP, and sharing much of its iconography and language with Chinese communism (Hack Reference Hack1999), gave an entirely new significance to Chinese-language films, books, and music that had been exported to the region since the end of World War II. In this context, virtually all media and publications emanating from China were considered to be a potential threat to stability. Fears of institutional ties between Malayan and Chinese communism justified the control of imported reading material from China under the Undesirable Publications Ordinance, introduced in 1948 (Kaur and Ramanathan Reference Kaur and Ramanathan2008).

The priorities for officials in Hong Kong, on the other hand, were very different. In this colonial port, caution, pragmatism, and a facade of neutrality were deemed essential to maintaining order, given the proximity of the colony to the PRC (Tsang Reference Tsang1997). As a result, under the cautious Governor Alexander Grantham, a more conciliatory approach was adopted, one that, as Priscilla Roberts (Reference Roberts, Roberts and Carroll2016, 36) argues, involved protecting Hong Kong's “interests rather than those of metropolitan government in London.” Here, acknowledgment of a desire on the part of local audiences for Chinese cultural products was balanced with the political will not to unnecessarily upset Beijing. Patterns of censorship in Hong Kong were thus designed to protect law and order rather than restrict the spread of global communism (Ng Reference Ng2008), while an American-financed Chinese-language propaganda infrastructure was permitted to develop covertly at the same time (Oyen Reference Oyen, Yangwen, Liu and Szonyi2010).

The quite different approaches adopted in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong led to tensions from the very start of the 1950s. Despite bans on “undesirable” materials in Malaya, PRC-published (or pro-PRC) pamphlets, books, and periodicals flooded into Southeast Asia after 1949—not always from the PRC itself but often from colonial Hong Kong, where there was a reluctance to ban material that was not overtly adversarial to British rule in the city. This included “magazines, etc, published in Hong Kong, which contain no overt propaganda but nonetheless succeed in giving a favourable picture of modern China” (TNA 1953b). Faced with publications such as these, censors in Singapore and Malaya struggled to find a coherent response that would not involve banning books from a fellow British colonial possession.

Nonetheless, despite differences of opinion about how best to control the flow of such Chinese media, officials in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia did agree on one thing—that they were dealing with the same conundrum when distinguishing what specific elements of PRC media were objectionable. What was it about any book, song, or film that made it dangerous: its socialism or its “Chineseness”? Biographies of Mao Zedong, Chinese editions of the writings of Marx or Stalin, and books about “progressive youth” (jinbu qingnian)—all barred from import into Malaya alongside dozens of other titles in 1952, for example (Singapore Press Holdings 1952)—were clearly socialist in content. But what of geography textbooks, folk songs, or pre-1949 modern literature published in the PRC? Bans on such material were far harder to justify under Emergency regulations and risked alienating large sections of the community, especially when so little other reading material in Chinese was readily available.

In the context of the Emergency, there is no doubt that socialism in any form—Chinese or Malayan—was a grave concern for colonial censors. However, Chinese media emanating from the PRC, and without an overtly “socialist” message, could also be potentially subversive insofar as it contradicted British policy and specifically “Malayanization.” As Oong Hak Ching (Reference Oong Hak1993, 248–55) has explained, the idea of implementing a policy of “Malayanization” was initiated by the Secretariat of Chinese Affairs in late 1948. Its subsequent adoption by the Colonial Office was directly inspired by the onset of the Emergency and fears about the integrity of an orderly process of decolonization should local communities not “buy into” British visions of an independent Malaya within the Commonwealth—a hypothetical “Southeast Asian Dominion,” as it was viewed at the time (Hack Reference Hack2001, 304).

If any communities in Malaya were to accept the British vision of an independent Malaya that would be “liberal-democratic in its politics, non-communal in its ordering of society, and pro-capital in its approach to socio-economic organisation” (Loh et al. Reference Loh, Liao, Lim and Seng2013, 30), then they would first have to be weaned off older diasporic affiliations with erstwhile “motherlands.” In this way, “Malayanization” was also a response to the failure of the Malayan Union project of 1948, which had seen Malay ethno-nationalism quash hopes for the granting of equal rights to Chinese-born residents of the region (Carstens Reference Carstens2005, 148).

“Malayanization” entailed a range of new programs and institutions. Chief among these was the MCA. Established in February 1949 as a new political entity led by what Donald Nonini (Reference Nonini2015, 36) has termed the “anti-communist Chinese bourgeoisie,” the MCA represented an attempt to foster a vision of a “Malayanized” Chinese identity that had been articulated by voices on both the left and the right prior to the war (Belogurova Reference Belogurova, James and Leake2015). The MCA would also fill the political vacuum created by the banning of the Kuomintang (KMT) in Malaya in the same year (Yong and McKenna Reference Yong and McKenna1990) and would assist colonial efforts at the forced resettlement of rural Chinese communities—a key strand of colonial policy to counter the communist insurgency (Tan Miau Ing Reference Ing2015).

Despite the existence of the MCA, the very officials who first championed a policy of “Malayanization” recognized the challenges inherent in its implementation. Writing in July 1949, Henry Gurney (then High Commissioner) suggested that the “Malayanisation of the Chinese will be a long and difficult process in which wise guidance and help will be required at every step” (cited in Oong Reference Oong Hak1993, 252). Secretary of Chinese Affairs David Gray was even less sanguine. “Malayanisation,” he lamented in 1952, “is not a particularly happy expression, and is not welcomed by the Chinese community.” It would have to suffice, however, for it was “difficult to find an alternative expression which fits in with the idea of turning Chinese thoughts away from China and building up a genuine desire to accept Malaya as their homeland and the subject of their loyalty” (IWM 1952, 41). The policy would only succeed with government intervention in fields such as immigration policy, citizenship, and Chinese-medium education. Educational reform, indeed, would be identified as the “main method” through which “Malayanization” might ultimately be achieved (IWM 1952, 41).

“Sentimental Patriotism for the Motherland”

Following the founding of the PRC in October 1949, “Malayanization” took on a new urgency. If the perceived foe around which the program had been designed in 1948 had been an amorphous “China mindedness,” after 1949 it became the appeal of “new China”—one that defined itself as anti-imperialist. It was in the field of education—and specifically within Chinese-medium schools in Malaya—that colonial fears about influence from the PRC were most immediate. As Tan Liok Ee (Reference Ee1997) has explained, the early 1950s were a period of intense debate about Chinese education, within wider discussions about what it would mean, come independence, to be “Malayan.” This was also a period when a plethora of institutions and groups emerged to voice divergent views about the place of Chinese-medium education in a decolonizing Malaya. These included everything from conservative, communal approaches to educators such as Lim Lian Geok, who articulated “an alternative vision of the Malayan nation which emphasized that its acceptance of its multi-ethnic, multilingual, and multicultural characteristics was essential to interracial integration” (Tan Liok Ee Reference Ee1997, 96). At the same time, many Chinese-medium schools in both Malaya and Singapore became centers of radical student politics in this period, much of it articulated in openly anti-colonial terms (e.g., Lee Ting Hui Reference Hui2011). While the place of Chinese education in a decolonizing Malaya and the rise of student radicalism in Chinese schools were both complex developments that defy reduction to a single cause, they were, in each case, linked to the question of perceived PRC influence—at least from the perspective of the colonial state. Firstly, in the early 1950s, virtually all Chinese-medium schools in Malaya were using, in the absence of other materials, textbooks and reading material produced in the PRC or Hong Kong. For this reason, the Chinese Secretariat initiated a program for the production of alternative teaching and reading materials in 1952 (Tan Liok Ee Reference Ee1997, 65). In these efforts, especially when it came to schools in rural areas, the colonial state solicited the support of the MCA. Working in coordination with local Chinese Affairs Officers, the MCA sourced Chinese-language reading materials for New Village libraries and schools, particularly from American agencies such as the United States Information Service (USIS).Footnote ¹ Indeed, the MCA received funding for this purpose from the colonial authorities (ANM 1952), as well as directly from the CIA-backed Asia Foundation, which had opened an office in Kuala Lumpur early in the decade (HIA 1953). In addition, the MCA established, from 1952 onwards, a working relationship with Hong Kong–based “Third Force” (Disan liliang) Chinese émigrés—itinerant Chinese intellectuals who professed loyalty to neither the Chinese Communist Party nor Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists. The most important “Third Force” group was the Union Press (UP; Youlian chubanshe), an Asia Foundation–financed organization headquartered in Kowloon (Mark Reference Mark2004, 190–93). Third Force publications from Hong Kong were already being sold in Singapore bookstores by the end of 1951 (TNA 1952). More importantly, however, and with the MCA's help, UP was supplying “all the Chinese books for … New Village Libraries practically at cost” by 1953 (ANM 1953).

Despite such measures, as well as a vigorous program of interception of posted material (Harper Reference Harper1998, 292–93), many textbooks used in Chinese-medium middle schools in Malaya continued to originate “outside Malaya” by the middle of the decade. These remained “narrowly Chinese” in the view of colonial officers, and thus undermined “Malayanization” (TNA 1955c). It was one thing to control the flow of books into New Village schools; it was quite another to curb the circulation of PRC textbooks in urban areas.

The problem was compounded by the very nature of the material in question. On the one hand, many Chinese-medium middle schools in Malaya used mainland Chinese-published teaching materials that had been produced prior to 1949. Such material contained no overtly Maoist content, but rather May Fourth nationalism, with an emphasis on iconoclasm and anti-imperialism. Such material could not be banned as “communist,” for it predated the founding of the PRC; at the same time, because it included the writings of some of the most widely respected authors in modern Chinese literature, banning such material risked accusations of anti-Chinese (as opposed to anti-PRC) bias. In the context of the Emergency, however, May Fourth literature proved arguably even more of a problem than post-1949 tracts, for such literature took on an entirely new relevance. As one contemporary observer phrased it:

More problematically, such content was complemented by increasing numbers of publications that praised the material achievements of “new China” since 1949, without necessarily calling for revolution. Books detailing PRC industrial, agricultural, and manufacturing output, or describing the geography and architecture of “new China,” were all included in this category.

The threat posed by this “new China” propaganda was considered so serious that it was discussed at the Mallaig Conference of December 1954, at which British colonial governors from across the region met in Singapore to discuss intelligence and security matters. At that meeting, a report entitled “Chinese Education and Nationalism in Chinese Schools” was tabled by Singapore's Chinese Secretariat. While detailing the events surrounding the National Service riots that had occurred in Singapore that same year (cf. Tan, Tan, and Hong Reference Tan Jing, Chiang and Lysa2011), the report suggested that such events were “only symptoms of the general situation in the middle schools.” Noting the lack of leadership within the Chinese community itself (in the absence of the KMT), the Secretariat suggested that:

The fear was, perhaps predictably, that this “emotional appeal” could be exploited by Malayan communists for local advantage. Little wonder then that the Colonial Office tried various programs to stop such material at source in Hong Kong. Solutions included innovative censorship methods such as the “postal route,” which would allow the Hong Kong authorities to stop publications of PRC provenance from passing through their territory without such items ever needing to be officially “banned” in Hong Kong itself—thus avoiding the ire of Beijing. The drawback of such an approach was that it required the micromanagement of posted materials and would never alleviate the problem of having to define what a “subversive publication” was in the first place. Such an approach was, unsurprisingly, not welcomed by officials in Malaya (TNA 1954b).

Recent scholarship on the PRC's “overseas Chinese affairs” (qiaowu) policies in the early to mid-1950s suggests that these colonial fears were at least partially justified. While many earlier studies have emphasized PRC policy regarding citizenship of compatriots beyond the PRC, the overseas Chinese “remained a frontline force for Beijing's interests abroad” in the 1950s (To Reference To2014, 61). And as Ren Guixiang and Zhao Hongying have shown, for example, specific policies were put in place to produce reading materials for dissemination to such communities that would “promote the nation-building and achievements of the motherland, and unite the overseas Chinese masses through patriotic spiritual education” (cited in Ren and Zhao Reference Guixiang and Hongying1999, 266). This is precisely what tracts praising the developmental achievements of “new China” did in Malayan schools.

With Hong Kong's reluctance to impose measures that might upset the PRC, the problem grew more acute. In a report on “the problem of subversion in Chinese schools in the Federation” compiled in September 1955, for example, Singapore's Chinese Secretariat lamented the fact that so many students at Malayan Chinese-medium middle schools were choosing publications from or about “new China” in favor of those extolling Malaya. Such material was engendering a “sentimental patriotism for the motherland” or (in an unusual colonial turn of phrase) the growth of a kind of “Chinese Islam”—that is, a sense of spiritual loyalty to China that transcended the quotidian issues of citizenship (BOD 1955b).

By this time, however, it was noted that such publications were not “undesirable” because of their potential utility for Malayan communists, but rather because of their ability to undermine colonial attempts at “Malayanization.” In addition, such material was believed to be encouraging Chinese students from Malaya to travel to the PRC for study, as many were undoubtedly doing in the absence of higher education opportunities in Malaya itself.Footnote ² Ironically, colonial authorities even recognized that the attraction of the PRC was so strong that it undermined Malayan communism as much as it threatened colonial policy: “We have an unusual, though ineffectual ally in the Malayan Communist Party…” remarked one Chinese Affairs official wryly, “which wants its adherents to stay in this country” (TNA 1953a)—that is, not travel to China. This is a point that Victor Purcell (Reference Purcell1954, 134), noting the stark differences in aim between the PRC government and the MCP, would also comment on at the same time.

External developments also conspired against colonial hopes. The Geneva Conference of 1954 and the Bandung Conference of 1955 have long been presented as a collective turning point in relations between China and Southeast Asia—the start of PRC attempts to establish itself as a cultural leader of the “nonaligned world” (e.g., Chen Reference Chen2009). Significantly, however, the subsequent emergence of a presentable and pragmatic PRC occurred at precisely the same time as—in the words of the then High Commissioner in Malaya, Donald MacGillivray—“the pall of fear which lay upon the country [Malaya] two or three years ago has lifted,” and the military fortunes of Malayan communism were on the wane (TNA 1955a). China's mid-1950s rise, in other words, coincided with Malayan communism's mid-1950s decline.

The sheer speed at which this change of fortunes was experienced by colonial officials tasked with monitoring “the Malayan Chinese” is perhaps best illustrated by the rapidly shifting assessments of the issue by the then Secretary of Chinese Affairs, Frank Brewer. When first evaluating “Chinese reactions to events in east Asia” in late 1954, Brewer had expressed a relatively relaxed view of PRC influence. While acknowledging that many Chinese in Malaya “cannot conceal their pride that China can at last command the attention of other nations,” Brewer also concluded that “outside events do not command so much attention” and that “internal affairs will provide a focus and interest which will counterbalance the distraction from Malayanisation caused by China” (TNA 1954a). Contrarily, however, Brewer seemed far less confident in a report on the “Chinese problem” in Malaya he penned less than six months later. While maintaining a positive attitude towards “Malayanization,” Brewer was now far more circumspect about the role of the PRC as a new variable in Malayan politics. Those in Malaya who sought to maintain feelings of loyalty to China were now finding succor, he admitted, in “the appeal of Communist China herself now that she has emerged as a World Power” (BOD 1955a).

By 1955, the blame for this problem was being laid squarely at Hong Kong's door. The issue was discussed again at Mallaig that year (TNA 1955b). On this occasion, however, there was far less patience with the approach adopted by Grantham's Hong Kong. Indeed, Hong Kong's emergence as “a base for the distribution of Chinese communist publicity material” was deemed such a threat that an internal report on the problem was initiated by the Colonial Office (TNA 1956b). Particularly vocal in their criticism of Hong Kong's “complacency” were figures such as MI5 officer Alex MacDonald (cf. Walton Reference Walton2013, 245–46), who advocated for greater controls over imports from Hong Kong into all British territories, while stressing that any attempt to produce what he termed “alternative pabulum for the young Chinese mind” would never be successful if tighter controls were not put in place by the Hong Kong authorities (TNA 1956b).

Colonial officials struggled to find an effective means of curbing such trends short of direct censorship. They lamented the fact that “anything which now comes from Red China, whether it be films, songs or fountain pens, is eagerly sought after by the younger Chinese.” In other words, “Communism and the new Chinese ‘culture’” were now both judged to “represent the same danger to Malaya” (TNA 1956c; emphasis added). “[The] difficulty arises,” mused one September 1956 report:

It was in this context that an effective blanket ban on material published by dozens of PRC publishers was introduced in Malaya under the Control of Imported Publications Ordinance in late 1958, and a similar blanket ban on proscribed PRC- and Hong Kong–based (pro-PRC) publishers was introduced in Singapore just a few months later.

The Union Press in Malaya

Up to this point, my story has been one of colonial reactions to the perceived threat of (initially) May Fourth nationalism and, from late 1954 onwards, Chinese cultural nationalism in Malayan schools. Such reactions ranged from the enlisting of local organizations such as the MCA in sourcing new reading material to outright censorship. As I have already hinted above, however, colonial responses could be just as proactive as reactive. Indeed, they covered a range of more clandestine activities designed not just to restrict access to PRC cultural production but also to foster rival media in its place. Significantly, just as Hong Kong had proven to be the proverbial thorn in the side of colonial Malayan censors, so too did Hong Kong emerge in the mid-1950s as the source of a possible remedy.

At the end of 1954—just as the post-Geneva “rise of China” was beginning to be noticed in Malaya—the beginnings of a more comprehensive program to counter PRC influence began to be explored. This was initiated not at the Colonial Office, but by sections of the Chinese Secretariat in Malaya and their allies within the MCA. This program involved the deployment of the very same “Third Force” intellectuals in Hong Kong who had been commissioned to provide textbooks for Malayan schools a few years earlier, but to a far greater degree.

UP had started operations in Hong Kong in January 1951 and was associated with the wider “Third Force” movement led by the US-based intellectual Carsun Chang (Zhang Junmai). In Hong Kong, UP collected intelligence on the PRC; it published essays, novels, and magazines deploring the state of life on the mainland; and it sought to “cooperate with congenial organisations and persons, to influence the overseas Chinese communities, to educate (in the broadest sense of the word) the Chinese youths in the Free World, particularly in Southeast Asia” (Union Cultural Organisation 1955). UP cultural workers professed a dislike of both communism and KMT authoritarianism, while expressing a desire to build “a new China, based upon the principles of democratic constitutionalism” (Chang Reference Chang1952, 14). More importantly, UP had proven itself capable of producing Chinese-language cultural products that looked progressive without being pro-PRC. Its periodical Xuesheng zhoubao (Student weekly), which commenced publication in Hong Kong in 1952, proved highly popular among student groups both in that city and in other parts of the Chinese-speaking world, including Southeast Asia (Shen Reference Shen2017, 591).

Probably the best known UP intellectual was Maria Yen (a.k.a. Jane Chiu; a.k.a. Yen Guilai; a.k.a. Qiu Xihong). Some of Yen's polemic essays on student life in post-1949 Beijing had been translated into English by USIS staffers and published through Macmillan in 1954 under the title The Umbrella Garden (Yen Reference Yen1954). It was this collection that led colonial officials in Southeast Asia to view Yen's oeuvre as precisely the sort of “pabulum” that needed to be circulated among young readers in Malaya (BOD 1955b).

As early as 1952, “Third Force” intellectuals had been feted in the region by official circles,Footnote ³ and the idea of using such figures for the purposes of cultural work in colonial Southeast Asia was articulated in print by Frank Brewer in early 1955 (BOD 1955a). Brewer would take a leading role in promoting this “Overseas Byzantium outside the red empire” over the following year or more. However, it was thanks primarily to individuals within a newly assertive MCA, particularly Leong Yew Koh (TNA 1956a)—a founding member of the MCA, head of its publicity subcommittee, and (according to British security officials) an “ex-KMT intelligence officer” (TNA, n.d.)—that such ideas would be realized in the mid-1950s. Leong expressed strong views about “Malayanization,” envisaging a postcolonial Malaya that would see the country emerge as a staunchly anti-communist and regulated society within the “Free World.”Footnote ⁴ He had also been directly involved in MCA debates with Malayan Chinese community groups over Chinese-medium education in 1953 (Tan Liok Ee Reference Ee1997, 140). This may explain why it was Leong who proposed directly, though secretly, to Donald MacGillivray in late 1954 the idea of employing UP intellectuals in Southeast Asia “in the field of sabotage as a means of stemming and disrupting Communist influence and subversion” (TNA 1955d). In the context of the perceived crisis in Chinese schools, Leong's proposal was acted upon. Indeed, MacGillivray seemed particularly open to the notion of talented propaganda workers who “can speak to the Chinese youth in the spiritual language they can understand”; UP also appears to have appealed to British suspicions about Chinese politics, for “they [UP cultural workers] lack a disciplined armed force or typical Chinese self-seeking power group to support them.” In other words, in British eyes, UP would be entirely malleable (TNA 1955d).

Consequently, in December 1954, the UP editor Yu Tak-foon (Yu Deguan; a.k.a. John Paul Yu) arrived in Singapore with an official invitation from the office of the High Commissioner, the financial backing of the Asia Foundation, and a six-month resident visa (TNA 1955d). Yu's visit—organized with the assistance of Hong Kong's Public Relations Office—was undertaken ostensibly to explore the possibility of producing a version of Xuesheng zhoubao for local consumption. It is almost certain, however, that the visit occurred as part of wider attempts to control the popularity of PRC-friendly media (HIA 1954a). Indeed, Asia Foundation accounts of Yu's work in Singapore read as a carbon copy of colonial sentiment of the time: “how important we [the Asia Foundation] feel it is to do something about the almost total absence of sources for people in Malaya who are forced to rely willy nilly, on materials either from the [Chinese] mainland or Leftist in inspiration” (HIA 1956).

Yu met with supporters of the “Third Force” during his stay in Singapore, such as Frank Brewer, as well as with anti-communist student groups in that city. He then proceeded to travel up the Malay Peninsula, being chaperoned on his travels by Leong Yew Koh. On completion of his tour, Yu secured an agreement with the colonial authorities for a small band of his peers from Hong Kong (including Maria Yen) to relocate to Singapore the following year and to start work there with Asia Foundation funding. By January 1955—a month after Yu Tak-foon's initial visit—the group had opened its own publishing house in Singapore (National Archives of Singapore 1955), the first of a series of corporate entities associated with UP that would operate in Southeast Asia through the 1960s. “Guidance” was provided to UP by the Secretary for Chinese Affairs, who acted as a liaison between the group and various arms of the colonial state, though all parties ensured that such links were kept entirely secret—even from groups such as the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the MCA's Alliance partner (BOD 1959).

Given UP's Asia Foundation backing, it would be tempting to view this foray into colonial politics as little more than a footnote in the wider story of the American use of anti-communist intellectuals in diasporic Chinese communities during the Cold War (cf. Peterson Reference Peterson, Roberts and Carroll2016). The evidence suggests, however, that colonial plans to counter Chinese media from the PRC with an overtly Malayan cultural identity were impressed upon UP from the very start. The “guidance” provided by both Frank Brewer and Leong Yew Koh clearly helped steer UP in a direction wholly in keeping with colonial policy. This was even noted by the Asia Foundation, which bemoaned the fact that colonial officers “had too great an influence on UP here [in Malaya]” (HIA 1959).

It was also on his original tour of Malaya with Leong Yew Koh that Yu Tak-foon appears to have experienced something of a Malayan epiphany, shifting from an initial “anti-communist” stance (typical of UP work published in Hong Kong in the first half of the 1950s) to an overtly “Malayanized” approach. “I realized that a new nation was being formed,” wrote Yu shortly after discussions with Leong: “the independence of Malaya seems inevitable, and she will be a very important country in Southeast Asia. If she is not properly guided, she may turn out to be a second Indonesia … so we should help the Malayan Chinese Association” (HIA 1954b). As Shuang Shen (Reference Shen2017) has revealed, the UP did initiate a local version of Xuesheng zhoubao in Southeast Asia. The group's work went beyond this, however. Within a year of Yu Tak-foon's arrival in Singapore, UP had expanded significantly. Its staff of over 200 people in the city produced a whole gamut of publications—from musical scores to novels—most clearly aimed at a youth market, and all seemingly designed in deliberate response to the challenge posed by PRC publications. In a detailed report penned by UP staff in Malaya in June 1956, the organization noted the “soft-going strategy” that had been adopted by the PRC since Geneva, as well as UP's plans for expansion into the postcolonial era to counter this continuing threat. Such plans ranged from the establishment of bookstores (for the distribution of “Free World literature”) and printing presses in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur to drama troupes, youth camps, and orchestras (HIA 1956)—indeed all manner of “alternative pabulum for the young Chinese mind” that British officials were asking for at this very time.

This 1956 report also contains an important note, however, about the “Malayanization” of UP—and UP's support of “Malayanization”—for the group's most effective endeavors in this period were not simply those that reflected standard “Third Force” ideology. While recent studies have suggested that this represented a case of the UP “morphing” to fit local conditions (Shen Reference Shen2017, 604), such developments mapped directly onto colonial desires to encourage “Malayanization” in the lead-up to Merdeka. Indeed, it was within this context that UP's most long-standing cultural legacy needs to be reexamined.

The much celebrated Chao foon (Jiao feng) was a literary magazine produced by UP specifically for a Chinese-speaking youth readership in Singapore and Malaya. It remains, to this day, one of the most celebrated fora for Malay(si)an Chinese literature and has inspired numerous dissertations and essays (e.g., Lim Reference Lim, Machart, Lim, Lim and Yamato2013). Its first issue was published in late 1955. Seldom commented upon in the academic literature, however, is the fact that its (Chinese) language was simplified to cater to what UP perceived to be a lower standard of Chinese comprehension on the part of Southeast Asia–based readers (HIA 1955a). The magazine was also instructed by both the Asia Foundation and the colonial state to be “completely disassociated publicly from the Union Press” and neither obviously anti-communist (lest it betray its origins) nor critical of colonial or Alliance (i.e., UMNO-MCA) policy (HIA 1955b).

Most importantly, however, Chao foon adopted an overtly “Malayanizing” agenda, supporting writers who worked on local (i.e., Malayan) topics, yet not overtly challenging government policy on “Chinese affairs.” Indeed, it defined itself as a “purely Malayanized literary magazine,” for which “mass appeal is essential” (HIA 1955c). This meant not simply bringing Malay vocabulary into its prose, publishing essays extolling the virtues of “Malayan-mindedness,” or even celebrating local landscapes and forms of expression—though Chao foon did all this. It also meant directly undermining forms of expression that were associated with the PRC (e.g., social realism); at the same time, Chao foon’s editors turned PRC-inspired cultural production on its head by labeling the work of May Fourth authors—those whose writings had so vexed colonial officials earlier in the decade—“neo-colonial” (Lim Reference Lim, Machart, Lim, Lim and Yamato2013, 159).

Chao foon remains, to this day, one of the most celebrated sources of Mahua literary history. It is commonly cited in studies of Sinophone cultural expression in Malaysia (e.g., Tee Reference Tong, Shih, Tsai and Bernards2013). Indeed, it is precisely the “Malayanized” content of the journal (devised under the guidance of the colonial state, an American propaganda agency, and the MCA) that is lauded by scholars working in comparative literature. Choon Bee Lim (Reference Lim, Machart, Lim, Lim and Yamato2013, 159), for example, argues that Chao foon represented an attempt to create a new form of Sinophone literature, which sought to “‘politically and culturally liberate’ Chinese literature in Malaya.” While not discounting the anti-communist ideology inherent in UP's origins, such assessments overlook the role played by the colonial state and its local allies in enabling Chao foon to be published in the first place and to continue to be published while non-Malayan rival publications were banned. Nor is there sufficient acknowledgment in such work of the motivation of the colonial state in initially encouraging Chao foon’s publication—that is, anxieties about the threat to “Malayanization” posed by PRC influence in Malayan schools.

In a retrospective report dated 1959, William Watts—the last colonial Deputy Secretary of the Interior and Justice in the Federation of Malaya—reflected on the role that UP had played in the closing months of British rule. While noting the delicate position of a clandestine group of Chinese intellectuals continuing to operate in a post-British Malaya, Watts was effusive in his praise for UP and its products (such as Chao foon). Admitting the limits of colonial planners in combating PRC “subversion,” Watts painted a picture of a late-colonial state that might well have lost its battle against PRC influence in the mid-1950s had it not been for its “Third Force” allies: