David Lockwood argues that by 1947 the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was ‘one of the most successful communist parties in Asia’ (p. 1). The foundations were laid even in its difficult early years (Chapters 2–3). Its flowering then came under Lai Teck (Secretary-General, 1939–47) as the party rejected an insurrectionist approach and sought to build Gramscian-style counter-hegemony: the dominance of ideas and organisation necessary as a prelude to a revolution. Notable successes in ‘counter-hegemonic practice’ came with unions and strikes (pp. 1–6, 43–45, 53–57, 87). Progress in that area combined in 1937–41 with its role as the most powerful anti-Japanese organiser, following which it also provided the most effective wartime resistance (Chapters 4–5).
The campaign to win broad support continued after 1945 despite some wanting to seize power before the British return (Chapters 6–7). This he argues was no ‘lost opportunity’: surely true when huge British forces were due to flow into the region and 100,000 Japanese remained (p. 74). By 1947 the MCP controlled most unions and was cooperating in a ‘united front from above’ with ‘bourgeois’ anti-colonial parties. This successful policy was only dropped after, in 1947, Lai Teck was accused — Lockwood suggests falsely — of being a traitor. Lockwood suggests Lai Teck’s enemies consistently sought a more violent approach from 1945, and so to remove Lai Teck: resulting in his denunciation (chapters 9–11, Appendix). After Lai Teck’s removal, a still-avoidable policy of spiralling violence was adopted in March 1948, prompting a British declaration of Emergency in June (pp. 145–9). The latter resulted in MCP decline, and the emasculation of trade unionism and the broader left. Together these events foreclosed alternative paths in Malayan history. In short, the removal of Lai Teck and ‘guerilla-suicide’ (p. 30) in pursuit of ‘a Maoist fantasy’ (pp. 141–42) was a disaster for party and for the country it wished to guide to multiracial equality (pp. 166–70), notwithstanding its repeated efforts to expand Malay membership never properly taking off.
In summary, this book makes two main contributions, one more controversial than the other. Firstly, it provides a useful revisionist framing of the MCP’s history. It surveys, in less than 180 pages of main text, MCP politics, decisions, and actions up to 1948. It does this while locating MCP issues alongside international communist debates (cooperating with the national bourgeoisie versus more class-based and violent methods) and concepts (hegemony, the war of position versus that of movement). This feels very different to Anna Belogurova’s The Nanyang Revolution: The Comintern and Chinese Networks in Southeast Asia, 1890–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2019); and to C.F. Yong’s The Origins of Malayan Communism of 1997, despite the latter seeing the party as having broad strengths despite betrayals (pp. xv–xvi, 210–11, 274–76). For MCP adaptation of Marxism, it might be read alongside Marc Opper’s exploration of MCP theoretical lines in his ‘Forging the Masses’ in Experiments in Marxism-Leninism in Cold War Southeast Asia ed. Matthew Galway and Marc Opper (Canberra: ANU, 2022).
This approach becomes more controversial as the book moves into 1947–48. For instance, it claims ‘a militarist opposition’ which included Chin Peng consistently sought a return to arms after 1945 (fortified by ‘speculation’ over Chin Peng’s mindset). It insists this was the primary driver of attempts to discredit Lai Teck, despite acknowledging that Chin Peng claims Lai Teck’s overall policy remained convincing into late 1947 (pp. 122, 125–7). Yet even Lockwood realises that Chin Peng’s main co-accuser (Yeung Kuo) was far from convinced on a militarist line right down to March 1948 (pp. 139–40; Hack, The Malayan Emergency, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 41–3). He also assumes Lai Teck’s show trial-like dismissal was necessary to ‘criminalise’ his line (p. 164). It is certainly true that Lai Teck’s initial vicelike grip on power, and his reputation amongst key cadres (‘Malaya’s Lenin’), complicated matters.Footnote 1 But MCP changes in line and rejections of prior policy as ‘deviation’, or as no longer fitting changed circumstances, did not necessarily require the denunciation of individuals. For instance, the Party made a major shift in policy, but not leadership, in 1951. Besides which, Lai Teck’s power was already being slowly eroded by early 1947, before his MCP opponents openly deployed spy accusations.
Secondly in importance then, and more controversially, the book adopts an approach to Lai Teck of sequentially casting doubt on each of the multiple documents that suggest he was a traitor: meaning he is re-represented as probably, albeit not certainly, a wronged loyalist. If source 1 says Lai Teck was a traitor, it is dismissed because the author had a possible motive to malign Lai Teck. If Source 2 attacks Lai Teck, it is dismissed for similar reasons. Source 3 may be dismissed because it partly relies on Source 1, and so on. Chin Peng, for instance is just one among several those whose testimony is dismissed as self-interested whenever it contradicts the book’s preferred argument.
The problem with this approach is that most sources could be questioned, and indeed should be. But historians generally do so by a combination of methods including fact-checking, triangulating versus other sources, and so on. But for key sources here, little attempt is made to apply the historians’ craft of using sources to confirm or confound each other. Multiple sources (including one senior MCP member who had turned ‘renegade’ plus other MCP members, two Japanese Kempetai including Major Onishi Satoru, and a Special Branch ‘Basic Paper’ on the MCP of 1950), corroborate each other (for Japanese sources, see Akashi Yoji, ‘Lai Teck, Secretary General of the Malayan Communist Party, 1939–1947’, Journal of the South Seas Society 49 (1994): 57–103). In addition, anyone making up stories (Onishi’s and Ng Yeh Lu’s accusations, for instance, were detailed), would risk others finding holes in their accounts.Footnote 2
Let’s look at one example of how the book’s mission to exonerate Lai Teck can lead to source misinterpretation. Lockwood dismisses the Malaya and Singapore Special Branches’ joint ‘Basic Paper on the Malayan Communist Party’ (not ‘on Communism’ as he calls it) of 1950 as only available to a few privileged ‘cognoscenti’. He speculates it was written ‘to deflect … stinging criticism’, and dismisses it as not completely reliable (p. 163). The first two statements are wrong, the last true for most documents.
So what is this ‘Basic Paper’ and how accessible is it? For decades it was indeed hidden away, but it has been available in the John Davis papers in the Imperial War Museum in London for more than a decade. It is a clunky handbook with many appendices: a guide to MCP history, policies and structures for security practitioners. ‘No part’ was to be reproduced ‘in any form’ without Special Branch permission.
Its 14 ‘Parts’ include a 49-page ‘History of the M.C.P.’ (Part II), ‘Party Policy and Plans’ (Part III), ‘M.C.P. Rules and Regulations’ (Part IV), and ‘Party Personalities’ (Part VI — withheld in the available version), as it tries to cover every conceivable aspect of the MCP.
In Part II, pp. 37–8, having summarised what the MCP investigation into Lai Teck of 1947 claimed (Lai Teck worked for the Japanese in the war and then the British after), it switches to the voice of Special Branch, stating that:
They suspected more, and it is true that Loi Tak had been operating as an agent in the Party ever since he first joined it in 1934, and that he had previously so operated in Shanghai and French Indo-China. He had originally been selected for training in 1931 in Moscow but had been arrested when on the point of entry into the Soviet Union and brought back. Soon after the fall of Singapore in February 1942, he was exposed to the Japanese by former Chinese detectives in Singapore Special Branch [one is named in other sources], and to save his own life had co-operated … He claimed afterwards that he gave away no British lives and the barest minimum of information to the Japanese of British plans. This claim cannot be substantiated or disproved, and whether he would have been able to safe-guard the Allied landings on the beaches whose locations he had betrayed was never put to the test. But it is certain that he revealed considerable information on Communist affairs, and maintained a complete dictatorship of the Party by so doing. It is probable that Loi Tak would argue that once he was captured, betrayals to the Japanese were his only method of staying alive and of keeping the Party together, and that despite those who lost their lives, even through his betrayals, the M.C.P survived the Occupation …. The full details of Loi Tak’s treachery may never be told, and comprehensive details would fill a paper in themselves. After he had disappeared from the Party in March 1947, Loi Teck spent a few months hiding in Singapore. He left for Hong Kong in August, but was not allowed to remain in the Colony, and proceeded to Siam. The last reliable news of him was from Bangkok, in September 1947, after which there is nothing but rumour, including reports from captured M.C.P. personnel that, with the aid of the C.C.P. Loi Tak had been liquidated.
According to Chin Peng’s 2003 memoirs (My Side of History: Alias Chin Peng, Singapore: Media Masters, p. 190), Lai Teck had indeed been eliminated in Bangkok, by Thai Communist Party members.
Further detail is given in the Basic Paper’s ‘Explanation of Chart 6, M.C.P. Communication System during the Japanese Occupation.’ Its point (1) on ‘Loi Tak’s direct contact with the Party on the Mainland’ states that:
Loi Tak made journeys to the mainland approximately once a month in order that he, personally, might be in contact with the important leaders … He used to travel in a Morris 8 h.p. Saloon No.S.4678, which was the property of the Kempei Tai in Singapore. …
At first he would proceed to Kuala Lumpur, where he would stay in the Collison (? Coliseum)’ Hotel in Batu Road, or at a Chinese Hotel in Jalan Sultan … [contacting people via a Chinese Sundry Shop at the corner of Klang Road, then] … to Perak, where he contacted Wong Ping near Bidor …. He used to make a separate journey to South Johore once a month ….
These journeys are outlined, down to secret meeting places. Lockwood dismisses use of the car as ‘allegedly’, noting other insurgents used cars anyway (p. 172). Yet the key point was that the vehicle was Kempeitai-owned. Despite all this, Lockwood elsewhere states that ‘the stark fact is that evidence from British official sources simply does not exist’ (p. 161), and alternatively that in so far as it does it is not based on original sources.
The ‘Basic Paper’, then, has imperfections, and as Lockwood correctly states relies on a range of sources of varying reliability. But it gives information beyond what the MCP had in its May 1948 Lai Teck exposure document, and additional to Ng Yeh Lu’s accusations.Footnote 3 The MCP could only guess he might have been a prewar traitor for instance: the British claimed they knew. It also treats accusations of Lai Teck according to degrees of certainty, for instance saying only that he was ‘alleged’ to have taken most MCP funds (Part VIII, p. 4), and that talk of his fate came only from ‘rumours’.
Other documents are also used oddly at times. For instance, MCP defector Lam Swee’s My Accusation (Kuala Lumpur: Benar Publications, 1951) is at one point used as if pre-Emergency, despite the author correctly dating it to 1951 elsewhere (p. 163). Senior police officer René Onraet’s failure to mention Lai Teck’s prewar treachery in his publications is taken as evidence it may never have happened (pp. 154–5): but his last book dates to 1946 (written around 1944), at which point Onraet would not have named a man who might still be an agent.Footnote 4 Ex-colonial official H.T. Pagden, it is implied, was all too naïve in not seeing Ng Yeh Lu’s denunciation of Lai Teck as revenge-driven lies (p. 161, citing Pagden’s Sept. 1948 ‘Unrest in Malaya’, Appendix 1, from UK National Archives, CO 537/3757). Yet revenge based on such detailed lies is not the only possible motive and, as I have noted elsewhere, telling detailed lies would risk exposure and, in this case, increase personal danger.
Above all else, Lai Teck’s treachery is generally believed because of the volume of sources suggesting it combined, critically, with their affirmatory intermeshing. Yes, Ng Yeh-Lu (Singapore’s postwar diplomat Wong Mon Cheng, p. 78) had a grievance (he claimed Lai Teck had betrayed him to the Kempeitai), but simply having a motive does not automatically make accusations untrue. Yes, Japanese could have hoped to get better treatment when accused of war crimes, but every additional untrue ‘fact’ given would increase risk of exposure. Onishi’s and Ng Yeh-Lu’s evidence is either corroboration, or else would suggest cooperative lying over some details.
As such, vital if imperfect sources for Lai Teck’s treachery remain Cheah Boon Kheng’s Red Star over Malaya (4th edition, 2012, pp. 83–101), Akashi Yoji for the Japanese side, and Leon Comber ‘Traitor of all Traitors’.Footnote 5 In addition Marc Opper’s existing works use French sources to detail Lai Teck’s experiences in Shanghai and Indochina, explore his role in Boo Chih Fu’s 1936 removal, and use MCP Chinese sources, with a book to follow, namely: Counter/Revolutionary Hero: Lai Teck and the Communist Revolution in Southeast Asia.Footnote 6 For the time being, we still lack a really authoritative, comprehensive life history, one which can encompass the many roles, identities and layers of ‘Lai Teck’: Vietnamese communist Trương Phước Đạt; intelligence services contact for multiple agencies; ‘the Plen’ who negotiated with Force 136 in December 1943 as ‘Chang Hong’; revered MCP Secretary-General; pressured postwar leader; man-on-the-run, and more).
Even if the reader did not agree with all of Lockwood’s claims, however, his argument that Lai Teck’s fall has been used to blacken the name of his policies, policies that may have been largely successful, demands serious attention. There is indeed, as Lockwood suggests, an element of Soviet show trial style absurdity in the fallen leader’s key policies suddenly being labelled deviationist and treacherous. There is, indeed, a case for asking if it would have been better to continue a policy of forging an anti-colonial ‘united front from above’ combined with union activity, even amidst the tightening controls of early 1948. Despite those controls (such as the attack on federations of trade unions), and contexts (such as the international communist turn to a more confrontational stance, and the failed challenge to the Malayan Federation plans) being formidable.
As such, Lockwood’s set of questions (pp. 154–5) is thought-provoking. How, if he was a traitor, did the party do well under his leadership? How far did he use contact with the Japanese to manage the party? We might add: if he was a traitor, what sort: how much did he reveal and keep secret? How far have his betrayals been multiplied and exaggerated? For instance, despite an apparent pattern of people being arrested after his visits or when he did not turn up, can we be sure he was responsible for the infamous Batu Caves incident of September 1942?Footnote 7 Alternatively, if he was, was his ‘effectiveness as a collaborator ended at the Batu Caves information’?Footnote 8 How far and often can information be safely extracted from a senior agent? How far could the strategy of someone who was in some respects a traitor — such as the united front from above — nevertheless be correct (rather than ‘rightist deviation’ or a ‘running dog’ policy as later labelled), so that in that respect we should read MCP documents with a very critical eye?Footnote 9 How often do people just assume a policy he supported was made in British interests? And how far, for instance after 1945 when the MCP was legally tolerated, did the British have any real leverage over him?
This questioning alerts us to be sceptical whenever anyone claims to know exactly what can be attributed to Lai Teck and his impact (pp. 51–2 and 189 fn26 is good, even funny, on some C.F. Yong and Cheah Boon Kheng claims).Footnote 10 It also alerts us to those who might attempt to utilise the allure of the ‘triple agent’ story to spice up publications and lives.Footnote 11 Once you have read Lockwood, you will read others, and his, statements on Lai Teck with heightened alertness to imaginative leaps. After all, international communist policy combined with local conditions framed decision-making, as did party politics. Even Lai Teck had to make history in circumstances not of his own choosing.
In short, this book provides a valuable, digestible, rich, thoughtful revisionist overview for MCP politics, programmes and achievements from foundation in 1930 up to 1946. It provides the strongest case yet that the MCP was in many ways successful up to 1947, especially while Lai Teck was Secretary-General. It provides a Marxist-communist theoretical edge, emphasis on ‘counter-hegemonic’ organisation, and helpful international context. For Lai Teck, himself, it is persuasive that more questions need asking and more scepticism exercising about details, that his united front policies and interim aim of a bourgeois democratic revolution served the MCP well, and that the subsequent policy could be interpreted as a disaster. For the argument that multiple actors of different nationality were probably all lying or fundamentally wrong about Lai Teck’s treachery, however, the analysis is too dismissive of the scale of evidence, too indifferent to accounts reinforcing each other, to be seen as more than a usefully provocative thought-exercise.
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David Lockwood argues that by 1947 the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was ‘one of the most successful communist parties in Asia’ (p. 1). The foundations were laid even in its difficult early years (Chapters 2–3). Its flowering then came under Lai Teck (Secretary-General, 1939–47) as the party rejected an insurrectionist approach and sought to build Gramscian-style counter-hegemony: the dominance of ideas and organisation necessary as a prelude to a revolution. Notable successes in ‘counter-hegemonic practice’ came with unions and strikes (pp. 1–6, 43–45, 53–57, 87). Progress in that area combined in 1937–41 with its role as the most powerful anti-Japanese organiser, following which it also provided the most effective wartime resistance (Chapters 4–5).
The campaign to win broad support continued after 1945 despite some wanting to seize power before the British return (Chapters 6–7). This he argues was no ‘lost opportunity’: surely true when huge British forces were due to flow into the region and 100,000 Japanese remained (p. 74). By 1947 the MCP controlled most unions and was cooperating in a ‘united front from above’ with ‘bourgeois’ anti-colonial parties. This successful policy was only dropped after, in 1947, Lai Teck was accused — Lockwood suggests falsely — of being a traitor. Lockwood suggests Lai Teck’s enemies consistently sought a more violent approach from 1945, and so to remove Lai Teck: resulting in his denunciation (chapters 9–11, Appendix). After Lai Teck’s removal, a still-avoidable policy of spiralling violence was adopted in March 1948, prompting a British declaration of Emergency in June (pp. 145–9). The latter resulted in MCP decline, and the emasculation of trade unionism and the broader left. Together these events foreclosed alternative paths in Malayan history. In short, the removal of Lai Teck and ‘guerilla-suicide’ (p. 30) in pursuit of ‘a Maoist fantasy’ (pp. 141–42) was a disaster for party and for the country it wished to guide to multiracial equality (pp. 166–70), notwithstanding its repeated efforts to expand Malay membership never properly taking off.
In summary, this book makes two main contributions, one more controversial than the other. Firstly, it provides a useful revisionist framing of the MCP’s history. It surveys, in less than 180 pages of main text, MCP politics, decisions, and actions up to 1948. It does this while locating MCP issues alongside international communist debates (cooperating with the national bourgeoisie versus more class-based and violent methods) and concepts (hegemony, the war of position versus that of movement). This feels very different to Anna Belogurova’s The Nanyang Revolution: The Comintern and Chinese Networks in Southeast Asia, 1890–1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2019); and to C.F. Yong’s The Origins of Malayan Communism of 1997, despite the latter seeing the party as having broad strengths despite betrayals (pp. xv–xvi, 210–11, 274–76). For MCP adaptation of Marxism, it might be read alongside Marc Opper’s exploration of MCP theoretical lines in his ‘Forging the Masses’ in Experiments in Marxism-Leninism in Cold War Southeast Asia ed. Matthew Galway and Marc Opper (Canberra: ANU, 2022).
This approach becomes more controversial as the book moves into 1947–48. For instance, it claims ‘a militarist opposition’ which included Chin Peng consistently sought a return to arms after 1945 (fortified by ‘speculation’ over Chin Peng’s mindset). It insists this was the primary driver of attempts to discredit Lai Teck, despite acknowledging that Chin Peng claims Lai Teck’s overall policy remained convincing into late 1947 (pp. 122, 125–7). Yet even Lockwood realises that Chin Peng’s main co-accuser (Yeung Kuo) was far from convinced on a militarist line right down to March 1948 (pp. 139–40; Hack, The Malayan Emergency, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 41–3). He also assumes Lai Teck’s show trial-like dismissal was necessary to ‘criminalise’ his line (p. 164). It is certainly true that Lai Teck’s initial vicelike grip on power, and his reputation amongst key cadres (‘Malaya’s Lenin’), complicated matters.Footnote 1 But MCP changes in line and rejections of prior policy as ‘deviation’, or as no longer fitting changed circumstances, did not necessarily require the denunciation of individuals. For instance, the Party made a major shift in policy, but not leadership, in 1951. Besides which, Lai Teck’s power was already being slowly eroded by early 1947, before his MCP opponents openly deployed spy accusations.
Secondly in importance then, and more controversially, the book adopts an approach to Lai Teck of sequentially casting doubt on each of the multiple documents that suggest he was a traitor: meaning he is re-represented as probably, albeit not certainly, a wronged loyalist. If source 1 says Lai Teck was a traitor, it is dismissed because the author had a possible motive to malign Lai Teck. If Source 2 attacks Lai Teck, it is dismissed for similar reasons. Source 3 may be dismissed because it partly relies on Source 1, and so on. Chin Peng, for instance is just one among several those whose testimony is dismissed as self-interested whenever it contradicts the book’s preferred argument.
The problem with this approach is that most sources could be questioned, and indeed should be. But historians generally do so by a combination of methods including fact-checking, triangulating versus other sources, and so on. But for key sources here, little attempt is made to apply the historians’ craft of using sources to confirm or confound each other. Multiple sources (including one senior MCP member who had turned ‘renegade’ plus other MCP members, two Japanese Kempetai including Major Onishi Satoru, and a Special Branch ‘Basic Paper’ on the MCP of 1950), corroborate each other (for Japanese sources, see Akashi Yoji, ‘Lai Teck, Secretary General of the Malayan Communist Party, 1939–1947’, Journal of the South Seas Society 49 (1994): 57–103). In addition, anyone making up stories (Onishi’s and Ng Yeh Lu’s accusations, for instance, were detailed), would risk others finding holes in their accounts.Footnote 2
Let’s look at one example of how the book’s mission to exonerate Lai Teck can lead to source misinterpretation. Lockwood dismisses the Malaya and Singapore Special Branches’ joint ‘Basic Paper on the Malayan Communist Party’ (not ‘on Communism’ as he calls it) of 1950 as only available to a few privileged ‘cognoscenti’. He speculates it was written ‘to deflect … stinging criticism’, and dismisses it as not completely reliable (p. 163). The first two statements are wrong, the last true for most documents.
So what is this ‘Basic Paper’ and how accessible is it? For decades it was indeed hidden away, but it has been available in the John Davis papers in the Imperial War Museum in London for more than a decade. It is a clunky handbook with many appendices: a guide to MCP history, policies and structures for security practitioners. ‘No part’ was to be reproduced ‘in any form’ without Special Branch permission.
Its 14 ‘Parts’ include a 49-page ‘History of the M.C.P.’ (Part II), ‘Party Policy and Plans’ (Part III), ‘M.C.P. Rules and Regulations’ (Part IV), and ‘Party Personalities’ (Part VI — withheld in the available version), as it tries to cover every conceivable aspect of the MCP.
In Part II, pp. 37–8, having summarised what the MCP investigation into Lai Teck of 1947 claimed (Lai Teck worked for the Japanese in the war and then the British after), it switches to the voice of Special Branch, stating that:
They suspected more, and it is true that Loi Tak had been operating as an agent in the Party ever since he first joined it in 1934, and that he had previously so operated in Shanghai and French Indo-China. He had originally been selected for training in 1931 in Moscow but had been arrested when on the point of entry into the Soviet Union and brought back. Soon after the fall of Singapore in February 1942, he was exposed to the Japanese by former Chinese detectives in Singapore Special Branch [one is named in other sources], and to save his own life had co-operated … He claimed afterwards that he gave away no British lives and the barest minimum of information to the Japanese of British plans. This claim cannot be substantiated or disproved, and whether he would have been able to safe-guard the Allied landings on the beaches whose locations he had betrayed was never put to the test. But it is certain that he revealed considerable information on Communist affairs, and maintained a complete dictatorship of the Party by so doing. It is probable that Loi Tak would argue that once he was captured, betrayals to the Japanese were his only method of staying alive and of keeping the Party together, and that despite those who lost their lives, even through his betrayals, the M.C.P survived the Occupation …. The full details of Loi Tak’s treachery may never be told, and comprehensive details would fill a paper in themselves. After he had disappeared from the Party in March 1947, Loi Teck spent a few months hiding in Singapore. He left for Hong Kong in August, but was not allowed to remain in the Colony, and proceeded to Siam. The last reliable news of him was from Bangkok, in September 1947, after which there is nothing but rumour, including reports from captured M.C.P. personnel that, with the aid of the C.C.P. Loi Tak had been liquidated.
According to Chin Peng’s 2003 memoirs (My Side of History: Alias Chin Peng, Singapore: Media Masters, p. 190), Lai Teck had indeed been eliminated in Bangkok, by Thai Communist Party members.
Further detail is given in the Basic Paper’s ‘Explanation of Chart 6, M.C.P. Communication System during the Japanese Occupation.’ Its point (1) on ‘Loi Tak’s direct contact with the Party on the Mainland’ states that:
Loi Tak made journeys to the mainland approximately once a month in order that he, personally, might be in contact with the important leaders … He used to travel in a Morris 8 h.p. Saloon No.S.4678, which was the property of the Kempei Tai in Singapore. …
At first he would proceed to Kuala Lumpur, where he would stay in the Collison (? Coliseum)’ Hotel in Batu Road, or at a Chinese Hotel in Jalan Sultan … [contacting people via a Chinese Sundry Shop at the corner of Klang Road, then] … to Perak, where he contacted Wong Ping near Bidor …. He used to make a separate journey to South Johore once a month ….
These journeys are outlined, down to secret meeting places. Lockwood dismisses use of the car as ‘allegedly’, noting other insurgents used cars anyway (p. 172). Yet the key point was that the vehicle was Kempeitai-owned. Despite all this, Lockwood elsewhere states that ‘the stark fact is that evidence from British official sources simply does not exist’ (p. 161), and alternatively that in so far as it does it is not based on original sources.
The ‘Basic Paper’, then, has imperfections, and as Lockwood correctly states relies on a range of sources of varying reliability. But it gives information beyond what the MCP had in its May 1948 Lai Teck exposure document, and additional to Ng Yeh Lu’s accusations.Footnote 3 The MCP could only guess he might have been a prewar traitor for instance: the British claimed they knew. It also treats accusations of Lai Teck according to degrees of certainty, for instance saying only that he was ‘alleged’ to have taken most MCP funds (Part VIII, p. 4), and that talk of his fate came only from ‘rumours’.
Other documents are also used oddly at times. For instance, MCP defector Lam Swee’s My Accusation (Kuala Lumpur: Benar Publications, 1951) is at one point used as if pre-Emergency, despite the author correctly dating it to 1951 elsewhere (p. 163). Senior police officer René Onraet’s failure to mention Lai Teck’s prewar treachery in his publications is taken as evidence it may never have happened (pp. 154–5): but his last book dates to 1946 (written around 1944), at which point Onraet would not have named a man who might still be an agent.Footnote 4 Ex-colonial official H.T. Pagden, it is implied, was all too naïve in not seeing Ng Yeh Lu’s denunciation of Lai Teck as revenge-driven lies (p. 161, citing Pagden’s Sept. 1948 ‘Unrest in Malaya’, Appendix 1, from UK National Archives, CO 537/3757). Yet revenge based on such detailed lies is not the only possible motive and, as I have noted elsewhere, telling detailed lies would risk exposure and, in this case, increase personal danger.
Above all else, Lai Teck’s treachery is generally believed because of the volume of sources suggesting it combined, critically, with their affirmatory intermeshing. Yes, Ng Yeh-Lu (Singapore’s postwar diplomat Wong Mon Cheng, p. 78) had a grievance (he claimed Lai Teck had betrayed him to the Kempeitai), but simply having a motive does not automatically make accusations untrue. Yes, Japanese could have hoped to get better treatment when accused of war crimes, but every additional untrue ‘fact’ given would increase risk of exposure. Onishi’s and Ng Yeh-Lu’s evidence is either corroboration, or else would suggest cooperative lying over some details.
As such, vital if imperfect sources for Lai Teck’s treachery remain Cheah Boon Kheng’s Red Star over Malaya (4th edition, 2012, pp. 83–101), Akashi Yoji for the Japanese side, and Leon Comber ‘Traitor of all Traitors’.Footnote 5 In addition Marc Opper’s existing works use French sources to detail Lai Teck’s experiences in Shanghai and Indochina, explore his role in Boo Chih Fu’s 1936 removal, and use MCP Chinese sources, with a book to follow, namely: Counter/Revolutionary Hero: Lai Teck and the Communist Revolution in Southeast Asia.Footnote 6 For the time being, we still lack a really authoritative, comprehensive life history, one which can encompass the many roles, identities and layers of ‘Lai Teck’: Vietnamese communist Trương Phước Đạt; intelligence services contact for multiple agencies; ‘the Plen’ who negotiated with Force 136 in December 1943 as ‘Chang Hong’; revered MCP Secretary-General; pressured postwar leader; man-on-the-run, and more).
Even if the reader did not agree with all of Lockwood’s claims, however, his argument that Lai Teck’s fall has been used to blacken the name of his policies, policies that may have been largely successful, demands serious attention. There is indeed, as Lockwood suggests, an element of Soviet show trial style absurdity in the fallen leader’s key policies suddenly being labelled deviationist and treacherous. There is, indeed, a case for asking if it would have been better to continue a policy of forging an anti-colonial ‘united front from above’ combined with union activity, even amidst the tightening controls of early 1948. Despite those controls (such as the attack on federations of trade unions), and contexts (such as the international communist turn to a more confrontational stance, and the failed challenge to the Malayan Federation plans) being formidable.
As such, Lockwood’s set of questions (pp. 154–5) is thought-provoking. How, if he was a traitor, did the party do well under his leadership? How far did he use contact with the Japanese to manage the party? We might add: if he was a traitor, what sort: how much did he reveal and keep secret? How far have his betrayals been multiplied and exaggerated? For instance, despite an apparent pattern of people being arrested after his visits or when he did not turn up, can we be sure he was responsible for the infamous Batu Caves incident of September 1942?Footnote 7 Alternatively, if he was, was his ‘effectiveness as a collaborator ended at the Batu Caves information’?Footnote 8 How far and often can information be safely extracted from a senior agent? How far could the strategy of someone who was in some respects a traitor — such as the united front from above — nevertheless be correct (rather than ‘rightist deviation’ or a ‘running dog’ policy as later labelled), so that in that respect we should read MCP documents with a very critical eye?Footnote 9 How often do people just assume a policy he supported was made in British interests? And how far, for instance after 1945 when the MCP was legally tolerated, did the British have any real leverage over him?
This questioning alerts us to be sceptical whenever anyone claims to know exactly what can be attributed to Lai Teck and his impact (pp. 51–2 and 189 fn26 is good, even funny, on some C.F. Yong and Cheah Boon Kheng claims).Footnote 10 It also alerts us to those who might attempt to utilise the allure of the ‘triple agent’ story to spice up publications and lives.Footnote 11 Once you have read Lockwood, you will read others, and his, statements on Lai Teck with heightened alertness to imaginative leaps. After all, international communist policy combined with local conditions framed decision-making, as did party politics. Even Lai Teck had to make history in circumstances not of his own choosing.
In short, this book provides a valuable, digestible, rich, thoughtful revisionist overview for MCP politics, programmes and achievements from foundation in 1930 up to 1946. It provides the strongest case yet that the MCP was in many ways successful up to 1947, especially while Lai Teck was Secretary-General. It provides a Marxist-communist theoretical edge, emphasis on ‘counter-hegemonic’ organisation, and helpful international context. For Lai Teck, himself, it is persuasive that more questions need asking and more scepticism exercising about details, that his united front policies and interim aim of a bourgeois democratic revolution served the MCP well, and that the subsequent policy could be interpreted as a disaster. For the argument that multiple actors of different nationality were probably all lying or fundamentally wrong about Lai Teck’s treachery, however, the analysis is too dismissive of the scale of evidence, too indifferent to accounts reinforcing each other, to be seen as more than a usefully provocative thought-exercise.