Introduction
References to ‘Chinese affairs’ are scattered throughout the academic literature on the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960). Chinese affairs officials represent key dramatis personae in many accounts of this conflict—the role played by state secretary of Chinese affairs John L. H. Davis at the much-studied Baling talks of December 1955 being one exampleFootnote 1—while some, most noticeably Victor Purcell, are still cited today as authorities on ‘the Chinese in Southeast Asia’.Footnote 2 Recent studies of the Malayan colonial state have also noted the place of Chinese affairs within the wider bureaucracy.Footnote 3
Nonetheless, there is a noticeable lack of scholarly curiosity about the very nature of Chinese affairs as a category of knowledge production in Malaya. This would not be so remarkable were it not for the increasing focus on ethnicity and race in writing on Malayan/Malaysian history more generally, much of it influenced by a wider ‘racial turn’ in intellectual debate across the English-speaking academy over the last two decades.Footnote 4 Such scholarship has correctly emphasised the significance of racialised categories (e.g. ‘the Chinese’) in British efforts to prosecute counter-insurgency in Malaya. It has also linked such efforts to earlier attempts by the colonial state to use racial categorisations as tools of governance and to establish ‘racialised hierarchies of labour’.Footnote 5 Drawing on the ‘define-and-rule’ literature developed by historians of colonial Africa and South Asia, for example, Shamsul Amri Baharuddin and Athi S. M. note the ‘investigative modalities’ deployed in colonial Malaya which included ‘the definition of a body of information that is needed and the procedures by which appropriate knowledge is gathered, ordered and classified, and then transformed into useable forms such as published reports, statistical returns, histories, gazettes, legal codes and encyclopedias’.Footnote 6 Such modalities and their outputs were crucial in defining basic notions of identification around racial categories—‘Chinese’, ‘Malay’, ‘Eurasian’, etc.—that were believed to be central to colonial efforts to defeat communism in the 1950s. Amrita Malhi underlines the extent to which the emergency ‘reinforced the centrality of “race” as the key organising principle of Malayan society, through both the waning trajectory of British rule and into its postcolonial future’.Footnote 7 Donald Nonini similarly suggests that such racial categories undermined class-based allegiances in the same era.Footnote 8
Within this body of race-conscious research on colonial knowledge production in Malaya, however, there has been limited discussion of the actual race-based knowledge that was produced.Footnote 9 Thus, while the weight of scholarly evidence has tipped the scales towards an acknowledgement of the colonial state’s creation of institutions that foregrounded race as a defining feature of late-colonial governance, less attention has been paid to what such racialised knowledge looked like.Footnote 10 In addition, only limited emphasis has been placed on the manner in which such knowledge developed and changed over the course of the emergency.
My aim here is to examine such questions by considering Chinese affairs in Malaya as a form of colonial knowledge that looked remarkably like that which historians have long associated with the development of the ‘ethnographic state’ in post-rebellion India. Just as there was an ‘explosion of ethnographic research, collection, and writing in the last decades of the nineteenth century [in India], as the state sought to accumulate the knowledge necessary both to explain the occurrence of the [1857] rebellion and to assure that it would never happen again’,Footnote 11 so too did the declaration of the emergency in Malaya in June 1948 inspire a rapid reordering of the accumulated body of knowledge regarding ‘the Chinese’ that had been collected and refined for almost a century theretofore.
As a form of ‘ethnogovernmentality’—a term used by Kasper Hoffmann in his work on a very different colonial context—Chinese affairs in its late-colonial iteration represented ‘a heterogeneous ensemble of biopolitical, disciplinary, sovereign, and territorial rationalities and practices of power specifically concerned with the government of ethnic populations’.Footnote 12 Chinese affairs covered both the ‘territorial rationalities and practices of power’ that were exercised under specific institutions (e.g. the Chinese Secretariat)—indeed, I use the term at different points in this article to refer to these institutions themselves—but also the underlying knowledge that informed such practices. The fundamental questions that the article asks, therefore, are how and why Chinese affairs (as a body of knowledge that had been developed for decades prior the 1940s) was reinvented during the Malayan Emergency. In what ways did Chinese affairs officials interpret the emergency itself and seek to contribute to its conclusion? How did the colonial origins of this form of ethnogovernmentality lead to particular conclusions on the part of Chinese affairs officials about the emergency and the role played by the various groups (‘squatters’, communist guerrillas, etc.) they identified as being key players in this conflict.
My exploration of this Malayan version of ethnogovernmentality will begin with an account of the institutional provenance of Chinese affairs, particularly its origins in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British approaches to the definition and subsequent management of the Chinese in Malaya. I will then reflect on the ways in which Chinese affairs was reimagined in the post–Second World War years and in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the emergency. In turn, I will explore how the outputs produced in the name of Chinese affairs—the ‘useable forms’, to cite Shamsul and Athi again,Footnote 13 into which Chinese affairs was distilled and disseminated—reflected an approach that framed what Chinese affairs bureaucrats themselves called the ‘Chinese problem’ as one of culture, custom, and ultimately ‘Chineseness’.Footnote 14 My focus will be the Monthly Review of Chinese Affairs (hereafter ‘the Review’).Footnote 15 This periodical was compiled in the name of the secretary of Chinese affairs from 1946 to 1956 and featured a regular digest of Chinese affairs expertise and opinion.
To be sure, the Review is cited, sparingly, in the secondary literature on the emergency, though often for the intelligence contained within its pages rather than as an ethnogovernmental tract. As I hope to show, however, it is not simply the emergency-relevant information in the Review which makes it a valuable source. We can also read many sections of this periodical as evidence of ethnogovernmental reflection, for the Review includes quasi-scholarly essays on the reasons for certain opinions or practices that were deemed to be held en masse by ‘the Chinese’, or specific sub-categories thereof.
In taking this approach, my intention is to move beyond the biographical methodologies adopted in some earlier studies of secretaries of Chinese affairs (and their predecessors, the protectors of Chinese).Footnote 16 I also seek to avoid the tendency to see Chinese affairs purely as a branch of the bureaucracy—though the field itself is virtually impossible to separate from its institutional framework. While acknowledging that Chinese affairs as a field of knowledge was the creation of men (and all of them were, indeed, men) who worked for the colonial state, my aim is to consider how the field itself reflected an approach that was being seen as increasingly outdated by the 1950s, despite the fact that the state believed that an understanding of ‘the Chinese’ was crucial to counter-insurgency efforts. Indeed, a better consideration of Chinese affairs might help to highlight one of the fundamental contradictions inherent in emergency policy—the belief in the need for Malaya’s Chinese to be ‘Malayanised’ (i.e. made to think of themselves as, first and foremost, Malayans) as part of the decolonisation process,Footnote 17 even while many sections of the colonial state maintained a belief that ‘the Chinese’ held certain innate traits that could only be changed with great difficulty. This contradiction would lead to tensions between those engaged in Chinese affairs and other sections of the colonial state as preparation for Malaya’s independence was being embarked upon. It would also lead to the formal institutions of Chinese affairs being dismantled in Malaya in the mid 1950s, even while the racialised knowledge they had one housed continued to influence scholarship for decades thereafter.
The institutionalisation of Chinese affairs
The Malayan colonial government employed a Union-/federal-level secretary of Chinese affairs (SCA) from 1946 through until 1956. The role, housed within a Chinese Secretariat in Kuala Lumpur, was responsible for advising other parts of the bureaucracy on matters related to the Chinese. The SCA operated separately from, but parallel to, a Chinese Affairs Department (CAD) which coordinated the work of state-level SCAs but had little actual power.Footnote 18 While these two bodies were separate, they worked alongside each other, with federal SCAs often being drawn from the cohort of state-level SCAs, for example. The federal SCA’s role was largely advisory in character and he had ‘very limited legal powers’, as well as a lack of funding and staff.Footnote 19 As for the CAD, the office was seen by those who worked within it as being ‘toothless’.Footnote 20 Nonetheless, as Anthony Short has noted, Chinese affairs officials ‘continued, sometimes vehemently, to assert Chinese interests in what, on the ground and at the rural level, often looked like a pattern of essentially Malay government’ in post-war Malaya.Footnote 21
The federal SCA’s institutional antecedent was the Chinese Protectorate. Known originally as the ‘Chinese Department’, this office had first been formed in 1877 in the Straits Settlements and had ‘acquired multiple functions aimed at governing Chinese migrants and residents in Malaya’, being closely associated with its first head (and ‘protector of Chinese’ for the Straits Settlements), William Pickering.Footnote 22 While the protectorate was headquartered in Singapore, colonial officials served as ‘protectors of Chinese’, both in specific territories within the Straits Settlements (e.g. Penang) and, by the late nineteenth century, in the ‘native states’ of Malaya—often undertaking very similar roles despite differences in title.Footnote 23 The duties of the secretary for Chinese affairs in Perak, for example, were said to ‘correspond to those of the protector of Chinese in the colony [the Straits Settlements]’ in the 1880s.Footnote 24 A secretary of Chinese affairs for the Federated Malay States as a whole was appointed in 1897,Footnote 25 and there was significant overlap between this position and the Chinese Protectorate in Singapore (where almost all Chinese affairs officials who served in Malaya were trained).Footnote 26 In 1904, for example, Warren D. Barnes was appointed to head both institutions.Footnote 27
The literature on the pre-war Chinese Protectorate has emphasised this institution’s responsibilities in managing ‘Chinese immigration; traffic in women and girls; and Chinese secret societies’.Footnote 28 Indeed, most accounts stress, correctly, the control of secret societies as the primary reason for the establishment of Pickering’s office in the first place,Footnote 29 while retrospective accounts penned by officials employed within the protectorate underline the state’s need for such an office because ‘they … [the Chinese] had a lot of intolerably difficult languages, and seemed, compared with the Malays, difficult to understand and deal with’.Footnote 30
Much of this existing scholarship highlights the place of the pre-war protectorate within what Rachel Leow has called a ‘language technocracy’.Footnote 31 Yet this organisation was far more than a translation unit, despite the importance it placed on language acquisition by its European managers.Footnote 32 It was, just as importantly, part of what Siew-Min Sai has called a wider practice of ‘racialised governmentality’, and an attempt to institutionalise ethnographic knowledge for the service of colonial rule.Footnote 33 British recruits to the protectorate were not just trained and tested on their fluency in Chinese languages, therefore, but also on their ‘knowledge of Chinese manners, habits of thought, laws and customs’.Footnote 34 The aim was the creation of a ‘European Sinologue class’.Footnote 35
Rather than gaining its insights from the world of scholarly Sinology,Footnote 36 however, this class would draw on and share knowledge that was being developed by colonial peers across British-controlled Asia—parallel entities such as the secretary for Chinese affairs in Hong Kong, which evolved out of policing in the 1910s,Footnote 37 and even a short-lived adviser on Chinese affairs in colonial Burma.Footnote 38 These scholar-bureaucrats would create an understanding of ‘the Chinese’ in Asia that was dominated by a quasi-scientific study of Chinese ‘tribes’ (i.e. provincial-origin or language groups) who traced their ancestral roots to China’s south-eastern coast.Footnote 39
In the 1920s, by which time the Protectorate had become a mainstay of colonial governance in the region, there was a discernible shift away from the nineteenth-century focus on using accumulated ethnographic knowledge to inform policy on immigration and crime and towards responding to new tensions in Malayan society.Footnote 40 These included risks posed by new forms of Chinese nationalism, as well as an increase in labour activism in Malaya’s tin-mining areas and rubber estates.Footnote 41 Nonetheless, many of the same features that had defined the work of Protectorate staff from the nineteenth century onwards continued: ‘The Protector’s functions … resembled those of the village headman in China’Footnote 42—managing matters relating to labour, investigating cases of human trafficking, ‘control of opium dens and opium smoking; smoothing over a quarrel between two Chinese tribes which had extended back to China, etc., etc., etc.’ [sic].Footnote 43
The rise in political and industrial activism in Malaya represented sufficient incentive for the colonial authorities to task the Chinese Protectorate with the production of a Monthly Review, a periodical ‘which presented an up-to-date report on political developments among the Chinese in not only Malaya but also China’.Footnote 44 This publication, produced for internal government circulation, ‘evolved into an extraordinary run of serialized reports of the thoughts, actions, and writings of Chinese communities in Malaya’,Footnote 45 and represented a significant exercise in open-source (and other) intelligence dissemination until the Japanese occupation. This same publication would become a major source of information on ‘subversive activities’ and proscribed Chinese-language publications entering Malaya in the immediate pre-war years.Footnote 46
The Protectorate ceased operations following the Japanese invasion of December 1941. However, in 1946, under the newly formed Malayan Union, an SCA was appointed under a new and pared down ‘Chinese Secretariat’. The first post-war SCA was Victor Purcell—an official who had been trained in the pre-war Protectorate system and whose views of what governing the Chinese entailed represented the training he had undertaken in China and Hong Kong in the pre-war period.Footnote 47 Purcell retired from the colonial service in the same year, however, taking up an academic post at Cambridge.Footnote 48 Another veteran of the pre-war Protectorate (and one of its scribes),Footnote 49 the Cantonese-speaking William Blythe, took over as SCA thereafter. Blythe was replaced by E. D. Fleming (also a former employee of the Protectorate) in April 1948, who thus witnessed the start of the Malayan Emergency later that year while in post. Fleming, in turn, retired at the end of 1950,Footnote 50 with David Gray taking over as SCA and remaining in post until 1952. Following a short interim in 1952/1953 in which R. H. Oakeley served as acting SCA, Frank Brewer took over as acting SCA in 1953 and would remain in post until May 1955. David Gray then returned to serve a second term as SCA.Footnote 51 Gray would be the final SCA in Malaya, returning to Britain in 1956.Footnote 52
While the post-war SCA looked ineffectual and powerless in comparison with the pre-war Protectorate, the onset of the emergency in 1948 fundamentally altered the significance of this corner of the colonial bureaucracy. The emergency ‘demonstrated [the] need to re-establish contact with [the] Chinese; not to administer them is [sic] isolation but to bring them within the administrative orbit’, as federal SCA Frank Brewer put it.Footnote 53 In the new context of an anti-colonial insurgency led by an army made up overwhelmingly of ethnic Chinese guerrillas and supported largely by rural Chinese communities, the Chinese affairs knowledge accumulated in the pre-war decades took on an entirely new salience. Indeed, as Francis Loh has shown, the CAD was expanded at the outset of the emergency because ‘the central government … found itself understaffed and unable to cope with the affairs of the Chinese community’.Footnote 54
It was in responding to the perceived threat posed by rural Chinese in Malaya (and the threats that communist guerrillas posed to these same communities) that Chinese affairs would be arguably most crucial. In particular, the ‘squatter problem’—the ‘risks posed by the Chinese rural dwellers who were in most cases squatters without land rights’ (as one former state-level SCA described it),Footnote 55 and who were believed to be the main source of support, intelligence, and recruitment for communist guerrillas—called for Chinese affairs expertise. From the start of the emergency, then, knowledge about the nature of the Chinese village and the Chinese family became intelligence for security planners dealing with ‘the Chinese peasant’ and ‘the Chinese bandit’. Chinese affairs was thus recodified as a vehicle to help ‘control the rural Chinese more closely’,Footnote 56 and to aid the process through which Chinese ‘squatters’ could be ‘Malayanised’.
The significance of Chinese affairs would only intensify with the introduction of resettlement—a scheme that was, of course, accelerated following the arrival of Harold Briggs in Malaya as director of operations in April 1950—and the subsequent policy of forcibly moving hundreds of thousands of rural dwellers into resettlement camps (known, from 1952 onwards, as ‘New Villages’).Footnote 57 It is no coincidence that, in May 1950, the CAD was expanded precisely so that the federal SCA and state-level SCAs could be brought into Briggs’s resettlement effort as a way of helping to articulate government policy to rural communities. Just as importantly, however, the SCA was seen as a cultural specialist who could advise government on how the Chinese might respond to group detention and resettlement.Footnote 58 Thus, while Chinese affairs officials had operated mainly in an advisory capacity during the interregnum between the end of the Japanese occupation and the start of the emergency, they would be called on effectively as agents of ethnogovernmentality once the Briggs Plan came into effect. As one contemporary report framed it in 1950: ‘the resettlement and regrouping of rural populations has to a large extent overshadowed other branches of Chinese Affairs work’.Footnote 59
From the middle of 1950 onwards, the federal SCA sat atop a wider but loosely dispersed ecosystem of colonial administrators that included eight state-level SCAs.Footnote 60 These state-level secretaries advised state administrations on all manner of issues relating to Chinese communities in their immediate area, while also collecting information on such communities for dissemination more widely. State-level SCAs were not always seen as welcome contributors, however, with many state governments viewing them as being too ‘pro-Chinese’ in their sentiments.Footnote 61 Indeed, some state SCAs experienced hostility from local Malay elites who resented the very existence of Chinese affairs as a branch of government, not because of its inherently racialised approach but because it was deemed to be overly sympathetic to the Chinese themselves.Footnote 62
State SCAs also took on the increasingly demanding role of controlling and censoring the circulation of the Chinese-language publications and films that were imported into Malaya from abroad. Indeed, under emergency regulations, state-level SCAs had the power to decide on the banning of Chinese-language cultural products from Hong Kong and elsewhere, thus making them arbiters of what readers and filmgoers in Malaya were legally able to consume.Footnote 63
In addition to controlling incoming media, SCAs at both the state and the federal level initiated the generation of Chinese-language products for the express purpose of supporting resettlement. At the federal level, for example, the SCA produced Farmers’ News (Nongmin xiaobao)—a Chinese-language newspaper designed for ‘unsophisticated’ readers in the resettlement areas.Footnote 64 Identified by the Chinese Secretariat as one its major propaganda successes, Farmers’ News relied on contributions from state SCAs (and other sources) for content.Footnote 65 It adopted a decidedly Chinese affairs editorial approach, celebrating Chinese traditions and cultural expression (e.g. Chinese folk songs), as well as what its editors referred to as ‘padi field gossip’,Footnote 66 while strictly aligning with government policy on the apparent benefits of resettlement.Footnote 67 Meanwhile, at the state level, SCAs oversaw the production of a range of more localised Chinese-language cultural outputs, including drama scripts ‘on various aspects of Malayan Chinese life, such as marriage, superstition, love, gambling and opium-smoking’ with the aim of ‘inculcating good Malayan citizenship’.Footnote 68 As one report from September 1951 framed it: ‘there would seem to be some mysterious connection between skills in Chinese Affairs and skill in propaganda’.Footnote 69
The self-styled ‘peculiar people’ and ‘oddities’Footnote 70 who made up this tight-knit cohort—one which celebrated its own heroes and martyrsFootnote 71—all spoke Chinese languages.Footnote 72 They were responsible not just for making the Chinese community aware of colonial policy but also for informing colonial policymakers about what was referred to, in the Malayan context, as Chinese adat (customs).Footnote 73 They were tasked with using their cultural knowledge to collect intelligence via ‘informal discussion with Malay and Chinese leaders whom … [one] … meets up and down the country’,Footnote 74 and to develop new initiatives for influencing Chinese communities on the basis of such knowledge. In this regard, Chinese affairs was very much typical of its time in terms of its dual-use function,Footnote 75 with the ethnographic knowledge accumulated over decades being harnessed for the purpose of counter-insurgency.
For much of the raw data that it collected ‘in the field’, however, this cohort relied extensively on a wider community of ethnic Chinese recruits who were employed either as Chinese affairs officers (CAOs), translators, or assistants. It was such people who actually undertook much of the work of translating Chinese-language press reports for publications such as the Review, and for rendering ideas that had been developed by the SCA into Chinese-language copy for Farmers’ News and other outputs. When it came to the work of resettlement, it was also these individuals who collaborated closely with the Malayan Chinese Association—another institutional by-product of the emergency—especially in terms of managing state relations with resettled communities.Footnote 76 Indeed, in some states, such as Selangor, the designated ‘squatter officer’ was the local assistant SCA himself.Footnote 77 And it was in the presence of such assistants—Chinese ‘among their own people’, as one state SCA phrased it—that British officials would travel as they sought to better understand the effects of government policy.Footnote 78
In the racialised hierarchies that defined the colonial state, there were strict limits to the ability of such individuals to rise above certain ranks. When Homer Cheng Hui Ming died in 1954, it was noted that he had reached ‘the highest post for a Chinese to aspire in that department’ by having been appointed assistant to the secretary for Chinese affairs in Singapore, having started his work in the Secretariat as a translator.Footnote 79 Yet Cheng was the exception for, in many cases, the identity of the non-European individuals who assisted state and federal SCAs in their work was obscured.Footnote 80 Far from enjoying the authority that was the preserve of their European managers then, these CAOs and their peers in the Secretariat sat very much at the social margins of the Chinese affairs ecosystem. They complained of being treated like ‘errand boys’ and ‘guinea pigs’ by others in the colonial state.Footnote 81 Yet the entire system of Chinese affairs knowledge creation was reliant upon such people, for it was they who collected and translated the texts that were included in digests such as the Review, and it was they who were instructed not just to communicate with resettled communities but, in many cases, to immerse themselves in the life of the resettled communities that the SCAs sought to analyse.Footnote 82
Protectorate legacies
The institutional origins of emergency-era Chinese affairs in the pre-war Protectorate had a number of consequences in terms of the knowledge that this office collected and distributed. Firstly, it meant that Chinese affairs, having developed at a time when large-scale immigration from China to Southeast Asia was common—and when the management of such immigration was part of the Protectorate’s remit—viewed the Chinese in Malaya with direct reference to China itself. Indeed, the Chinese affairs approach assumed an inherent ‘China minded-ness’, or what one unnamed official (with apparent unintentional irony) described as ‘an imperialism over the mind [which] is the traditional Chinese technique for retaining the loyalty of their race’ when it came to the psychological sway that China (dynastic, Nationalist, or communist) held over communities in Malaya.Footnote 83 Therefore, just as the Protectorate had kept abreast of contemporary developments in China that might have had an impact on community politics in Malaya in the 1920s, Chinese affairs officials in the post-war period remained closely informed about China, constantly interpreting developments in Malaya in this context—something that I shall explore in more detail below with reference to the Review.
Secondly, post-war Chinese affairs inherited from the ‘paternalist anachronism’Footnote 84 of the Protectorate a sense that the Chinese needed to be protected from themselves. While this reflected the responsibilities of the role both pre- and post-war, particularly when it came to guarding against human trafficking, prostitution, and the maltreatment of children—topics that were still being discussed as late as mid 1955Footnote 85—it tended to influence Chinese affairs in other areas as well and would be emphasised during the process of resettlement, which was framed as a policy of protecting the rural Chinese from communist violence. This also tended to generate a significant amount of self-aggrandisement. As numerous scholars are (and SCAs themselves were) prone to highlight, for example, the protector of Chinese bequeathed to his post-war peers the Hokkien sobriquet of taijin (great man)Footnote 86 and a belief that Chinese affairs bureaucrats were ‘father and mother officials’ to the Chinese community as a whole.Footnote 87
Thirdly, Chinese Affairs was built around an assumption about the ‘separateness of the Chinese’.Footnote 88 Here was a specific and clearly categorisable group of people that was not simply different from other ‘races’ in Malaya but that could be understood with reference to innate traits. Understanding such a people meant studying them in what would today be called an ethnographic fashion. Thus, when Wilfred Blythe—‘the most knowledgeable among non-Chinese … authorities on the interesting subject of Chinese secret societies’Footnote 89—was serving as federal SCA in 1947, he engaged in participant observation of Chinese secret society rituals and practices, later publishing his research on the subject in monograph form.Footnote 90 And when one of Blythe’s successors as federal SCA, Frank Brewer, ruminated on ways to solve the ‘Chinese problem in Malaya’ in 1955, he underlined the need for ethnographic and historical understanding: ‘A knowledge of Confucian doctrine is essential, as is a knowledge of Chinese history. Equally important is a knowledge of the “Three Principles” of Dr Sun Yat-sen.’Footnote 91 Such an approach led to some remarkable generalisations and instances of cultural reductionism during the emergency, though often framed in a noticeably sympathetic way: ‘The Chinese are rather like the Scots’, mused David Gray, the federal SCA, when discussing the importance of Chinese-language education in 1952—‘they love education and they still have a great respect for the teacher.’Footnote 92
Finally, Chinese affairs in Malaya continued to operate within wider imperial networks, drawing on knowledge, personnel, and practices from colonial Singapore and Hong Kong, as well as from the waning British presence in China. Within the Protectorate, officials like Purcell had ‘generalised and simplified the quality of “Chinese” people as a whole’, regardless of whether they were found in Malaya, Hong Kong, or elsewhere in the British empire. To be sure, in the post-1949 context, British access to the Chinese mainland was limited, even after British diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in January 1950. Yet the treatment of Chinese affairs as a pan-imperial system of knowledge gained from interaction with Chinese people in China and throughout Britain’s ‘eastern dependencies’, as well as by exchanging information between Chinese affairs officers in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Hong Kong (or British diplomats in China), would remain a feature of the field. The Chinese affairs worldview was one which always looked beyond national and colonial borders and viewed ‘the Chinese’ as a transnational race about whom ‘a full understanding may be a lifetime’s study’.Footnote 93
All this meant that post-war Chinese affairs in Malaya, while operating in a very different political context from the Protectorate, was informed by pre-war assumptions and approaches. These included the belief that a race called ‘the Chinese’ (who lived in China, Malaya, Hong Kong, and elsewhere)—and the ‘tribes’ into which this people could be split—carried a common set of innate traits that explained their collective behaviour in any given location; that such people needed to be studied while they were being governed; that the Chinese within the British empire required colonial supervision (to save them from themselves); and that the fate of this diasporic people, and its numerous ‘tribes’, was indelibly linked to the fate of China itself.
The Review
One of the clearest links between the pre-war Protectorate and post-war Chinese affairs institutions was the Review. A Monthly Review of Chinese Affairs was first published for the Straits Settlements at the end of 1930 in the context of a period of ‘turbulent’ interaction between Kuomintang-affiliated Chinese and pro-communist groups of activists, though separate Reviews were published in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.Footnote 94 The Review was discontinued during the Second World War but revived in the middle of 1946. Thereafter, it continued to be produced by the Secretariat in Kuala Lumpur through until September 1956, when it was closed down (presaging the closure of the Secretariat itself) on the disingenuous grounds that ‘Chinese newspapers and other publications will provide sufficient material for the study of Chinese politics in the Federation [of Malaya]’.Footnote 95
As the main vehicle through which intelligence collected and opinion formulated by the federal SCA could be shared with other branches of government in Malaya—and, noticeably, Singapore and Hong Kong—the Review provides researchers today with a window onto the world of Chinese affairs itself. Officially, its author was the SCA, though much of the content of the Review was never attributed to any named individual(s). This periodical represented one of the main vehicles through which the SCA gave ‘advice to Government on Chinese reactions and tendencies’,Footnote 96 and its production was said to have kept the Secretariat’s staff ‘on its toes’ with the sheer volume of information that had to be collated for its publication.Footnote 97
The Review included translations from the Chinese-language press in Malaya, China, and Hong Kong. It reproduced reports sent to the federal SCA from state-level SCAs.Footnote 98 Yet the Review also contained a diverse range of other information. This included records of overheard conversations by villagers and business leaders alike; excerpts from intercepted mail from China or Chinese communities abroad; field reports compiled by SCAs in Malaya or elsewhere in Asia;Footnote 99 and assessments written by British officials in colonial Hong Kong or at consular posts in China. The Review reported on the movements and activities of prominent community leaders and businesspeople as well as civic, political, and religious groups. It contained information about more mundane matters that were deemed relevant within the wider context of the emergency, from the price of specific foodstuffs to the Chinese-language publications on sale at Penang bookstalls. All of this would suggest that M. G. Han’s description of the Review as ‘top secret reports for the Colonial Office in London, which reported on subversive activities in Singapore and Malaya’ is only partially accurate, for the periodical reflected the wider field of Chinese affairs in its diasporic and transborder interests.Footnote 100 The distribution of the Review was considered sufficiently sensitive by 1955 to justify instructions that all earlier copies of it be destroyed and that any future copies be destroyed after use.Footnote 101
In addition to the intelligence functions of the Review, the periodical also contained less overtly sensitive content—albeit linked, from 1948 onwards, to counter-insurgency—which drew directly on Chinese affairs knowledge. Such content was often presented in the form of essays or memoranda attached to the Review as appendices. These memoranda touched on specific issues that were deemed topical at any specific moment, and sometimes rationalised political, social, or cultural developments in Malaya through an ethnographic lens, offering quasi-scholarly analyses of the socio-cultural reasons for certain developments. Examples of these will be explored below.
What is perhaps most striking about the Review in the first three or more years of its post-war existence is its lack of focus on Malaya per se and its very limited interest in Malayan communism.Footnote 102 Every issue of the Review, from the first post-war (marked as ‘pilot (trial)’) issue in July 1946 through until 1952, for instance, started with a synopsis of events not in Malaya itself but in China. These accounts included highly detailed reports on military developments during the Chinese Civil War, often supported by hand-drawn maps detailing the main theatres of that conflict, as well as the geopolitical consequences of it—in Southeast Asia and more broadly.
In some cases, the Review even revealed an intriguing tendency on the part of Chinese affairs officials to conflate Malaya and China. A remarkable error is included in the August 1946 issue, for example, in which events during the Chinese Civil War are mistakenly reported as having occurred in Malaya, with the offending Malayan toponym crossed out: ‘The clash which occurred between American marines and Communist troops in the neighbourhood of Pahang at the end July caused rather less trouble than might have been expected.’Footnote 103
The reason to privilege events in China over those in Malaya was not overtly explained within the pages of the Review, yet this practice reflected an ingrained Sinocentrism inherent in Chinese affairs and, later, in the ways in which this cohort of scholar-officials framed the Malayan Emergency—that is, as a conflict occurring just as communist forces were also pushing southwards towards victory in China. We might expect the Review in late 1948 (i.e. in the period immediately following the declaration of the emergency), for example, to be focused squarely on guerrilla attacks on police posts in Malaya. The October 1948 issue starts, however, with the statement that ‘October has been a black month for the National Government of China’, referencing the communist victories in north-eastern China that were achieved during the Liaoning–Shenyang campaign. While addressing the effects that a potential future communist government in China might have on global politics, the imminent collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime is described as ‘a situation obviously fraught with danger to Malaya and the other countries with large Overseas Chinese populations’.Footnote 104
In November 1948, reflection continued in this manner, with the possible establishment of a communist government in China being compared to other world events of that year in a distinctly diasporic vein: ‘for the majority of the Overseas Chinese the establishment of a new regime in China is as of much importance as the prospects of Israel are for Jews all over the world’.Footnote 105 What effect would an attempted Nationalist Chinese counter-offensive against the forces of the northern China–based communists have on the southern provinces of China to which the vast majority of Malaya’s Chinese traced their ancestry?Footnote 106 And, by the middle of 1949, as ‘the communists in China were beginning to occupy the home provinces of the Malayan Chinese’, what would be the effects of such events on everything from trade to community morale in Malaya?Footnote 107
Thus, the Chinese affairs approach was one which posited the centrality of China to the outcome of the emergency (in keeping with the China-centred approach that was one of the legacies of the field’s pre-war development) and which often relegated the Malayan communists to the peripheries of concern:
Any survey of Chinese Affairs in the Federation to-day must stress, ‘ad nauseum’, two things. The first is that the establishment of a new and probably an internationally recognised Chinese Government cannot be very far off and that in at least a technical sense it will be the Government for all those Chinese in Malaya who regard themselves as being in some way or other Chinese ‘nationals’ … The second is that the Chinese must, if it is practicable, be reconciled with the [Malayan] Government’s emergency policy in order to avoid the possibility of a gulf between Government and the local Chinese which the new Government of China might try to fill on behalf of the Chinese community (not necessarily on behalf of the Malayan Communist Party).Footnote 108
The authors of the Review invariably drew on the colonial category of the Chinese ‘tribe’ in coming to terms with Malayan attitudes towards the brightening fortunes of the communists in China in this early stage of the emergency. Such assessments would shift as the situation in both China and Malaya changed across 1949. In July, for example, the Review noted a ‘Kuala Lumpur report [which] suggested that the Hokkiens were becoming more favourably disposed to the Communists than the Cantonese’.Footnote 109 Yet, in August, ‘the Hokkiens, whose province [in China] is now almost overrun [by the Chinese Communist Party], are thought to be worried about communist conscription of manpower and commandeering of food and possible confiscation of landed property’.Footnote 110 A detailed analysis of responses to ‘the revolution in China’ appearing in the October 1949 issue—coinciding with the formal establishment of the PRC—was framed in an even more overtly ‘tribal’ manner:
It is known that in Kuala Lumpur there are many sympathisers of Mao Tse-tung (as a leader of China) amongst the Fuichiu [Huizhou] Hakkas who are traditionally anti-Sun Yat-sen and anti-Chiang Kai-shek …. They are supposed to be unusually enthusiastic, and their enthusiasm increased when a Hakka, Yeh Chien-ying [Ye Jianying], was appointed as Governor of Kwangtung [Guangdong] Province. The Taipu [Dabu] Hakkas to a lesser extent are said to have leftist inclinations but the Kayinchius [Jiayingzhou], who are under English-speaking leadership, are steady. The community as a whole are also steady and show little sympathy for the China communists. The leading Hokkiens belong to a staunch KMT [Kuomintang] clique, but the smaller clan associations and a few clubs are potential supporters of the new regime.Footnote 111
Such an approach continued throughout the early months following the founding of the PRC, though often in self-contradictory terms. If the ‘leading Hokkiens’ had been ‘staunch KMT’ supporters in October, then by December they were ‘showing most enthusiasm for the new regime in China’, while the ‘local Cantonese eagerly lap up reports in the “China Press” [a pro-KMT newspaper published in Kuala Lumpur] describing unsettled conditions in Kwangtung’.Footnote 112 Thus, despite the quasi-scientific framing of such Chinese affairs knowledge, the Review lacked consistency in its rationalisation of the behaviour of the very communities it claimed to understand. Chinese affairs expertise often resulted in entirely contradictory intelligence assessments.
The ethnography of detention and resettlement
As mentioned above, the policy of group detention and forced resettlement was the catalyst for a re-evaluation of the utility of Chinese affairs in Malaya. This is not to suggest, however, that it changed the nature of Chinese affairs knowledge and its deployment. As a number of reports and extended essays that were published in the Review in 1949 and 1950—a period when E. D. Fleming served as federal SCA and thus oversaw publication of the Review—suggest, resettlement and parallel schemes in Malaya were commonly interpreted with reference to China.
This is evident, firstly, in the extent to which resettlement in Malaya was often interpreted within the context of large-scale demographic and counter-insurgency schemes in mainland China, both contemporary and historical. For instance, it was noted in the Review in December 1949, with some measure of historical cognisance, that resettlement in Malaya was actually ‘called by the Chinese “the pacification of the countryside”’,Footnote 113 referencing anti-communist, ‘rural pacification’ (qingxiang) campaigns implemented by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists in the 1930s and the collaborationist government of Wang Jingwei in the 1940s, both of which involved the fencing off of villages in eastern China as a means of disrupting links between rural communities and communist guerrillas.Footnote 114 Ironically, in this regard, the Secretariat’s analysis shared something in common with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) accounts of resettlement in Malaya which, as the Review noted in 1951, compared colonial efforts in Malaya with Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-communist efforts in rural China two decades earlier: ‘It is interesting that the Peking Radio once described the [colonial Malayan] government’s Emergency policy as a blockade such as Chiang Kai-shek once tried to enforce on the Communists in Kiangsi [Jiangxi] Province.’Footnote 115
In other cases, it was Chinese communist efforts to tackle potential threats to the young PRC that piqued the interest of the SCA. The Review noted ‘guerrilla activity’ in China in the early months of 1950, using the very same terms that had, since late 1948, been deemed an officially accepted part of the emergency lexicon: ‘the Communists admit[ting] the presence of “bandits” in many of the provinces’.Footnote 116 Such observations would continue across the first year of the PRC’s existence. ‘By their own admission’, wrote the SCA in March 1951, ‘the Peking regime have had an uncomfortable month of peasant revolt and Nationalist intrigue. The [Chinese] Communists reported a plot by ten Chinese Secret societies, aiming to overthrow the government by nationwide peasant revolt.’Footnote 117 Yet reports noted by state SCAs and reproduced in the Review in the same year highlighted the belief in ‘bandit glamour’ in rural Malaya as well: ‘the bandits still possess a certain amount of glamour in the minds of the country people, who are always inclined to smile secretly when they see people “getting away with things”’.Footnote 118
While not directly comparing China to Malaya in such instances, the SCA clearly took an interest in the supposed propensity for Chinese peasants to challenge government authority, be it communist or colonial. Such an interest parallelled a wider academic and governmental fascination with the political significance (and potential threat) of ‘the Chinese peasant’Footnote 119—paving the way for ideas such as ‘peasant nationalism’, which would emerge elsewhere in the context of the Second Indochina War.Footnote 120 Indeed, such comparisons fitted with a wider discourse about the ‘Chinese peasant’ in Malaya that was being developed in this same period by Chinese affairs officials and which resulted in discussions about what ‘the squatter [is] like as a man’.Footnote 121
Chinese affairs officials also took a keen interest in studying the effects of policies that were having major demographic changes in rural China at precisely the same time as resettlement was being promoted in Malaya. The most noticeable of these was, of course, the land reform campaign introduced by the CCP. While this had started in northern China during the period of the Japanese occupation, it was rolled out in southern China—in areas to which many Malayan Chinese were still travelling during the early 1950s—after the establishment of the PRC. Early 1951 issues of the Review featured a significant amount of copy on this topic, including, for example, ‘Travellers tales of conditions in South China’, in which recent visitors to the PRC were quoted as noticing the effects of land reform in Fujian and Guangdong.Footnote 122 Other reports noted the consequences of PRC land reform for Chinese in Malaya who had assets and relatives in China.Footnote 123 But the focus on land reform also suggested a wider interest by the Secretariat in the violence of such changes to rural Chinese society, be that in Malaya or the PRC. Reports of the ‘massacres’ of people labelled as ‘landlords’ in the PRC were featured in the same issue as reports of the murder of village headmen by Malayan communists in March 1951, for example.Footnote 124
Beyond such implied references to the possible consequences of resettlement in Malaya (via study of the social effects of land reform in China), Chinese affairs knowledge was also brought to bear when directly interpreting the behaviour of ‘squatters’ through an ethnographic lens—especially early in the emergency. Of particular note was a report in the December 1948 issue of the Review evaluating the recent visit to Malaya of the New Zealand ethnographer Raymond Firth (during which Firth noted, significantly, that ‘serious studies of the Chinese in Malaya … are almost entirely absent’),Footnote 125 as well as Firth’s subsequent suggestions for the study of what he referred to as ‘newly formed Chinese agricultural communities’.Footnote 126 The Secretariat noted the significance of the timing of Firth’s visit to Malaya—a period when the resettlement of ‘squatter’ communities was first being explored but prior to the large-scale resettlement enacted following the implementation of the Briggs Plan in 1950—and stressed the importance of social science research to the prosecution of the emergency: ‘the present emergency [has] brought with it the need for a more exact knowledge of the cultural and political affinities of the different sections of the Chinese community’.Footnote 127 Firth’s visit, and the problems he identified with a lack of serious academic study of the Chinese in Malaya, were seen as aligning directly with the aspirations of the Chinese affairs fraternity as it tried to come to terms with resettlement: ‘he [Firth] quickly spotted the “squatter problem” and noted important gaps in prevailing knowledge of the Chinese social structure’.Footnote 128 It was up to the SCA to answer the call to better understand rural Chinese communities at a time when their fate was seen as central to the outcome of the emergency.
The Secretariat sought to not simply identify such gaps but to also close them in the pages of the Review over the following months. One example was an essay entitled ‘The family system and information’, which appeared in the December 1949 issue. This unattributed study sought to rationalise a perceived hostility around cooperation from rural Chinese in Malaya in responding to requests from the colonial state for intelligence about the activities of communist guerrillas on the basis of Chinese notions of kinship:
It is generally considered that the main factor in preserving Chinese civilisation at a uniformly high standard throughout wars and crises has been the family system and that a fairly rigid adherence to it has prevented these relapses into barbarism which have been characteristic of other cultures …. Among the Chinese peasants who form the main stock of the Malayan Chinese Rural population the system was well entrenched although not in its most exaggerated form, and its influence still remains powerful …. To betray a kinsman and, further, not to help and shelter him when he is in distress is contrary to the moral code.Footnote 129
This deep-rooted ‘family system’, and the stubborn Chinese adherence to it, argued the same report, could explain everything that was needed to know about a lack of cooperation on the part of rural Chinese communities with the authorities—something that contradicted even those who were nominally on the ‘same side’ as the SCA in prosecuting the emergency: ‘Mr Tan Cheng Lock [the founder of the Malayan Chinese Association] describes race as a myth; unfortunately in Malaya this is untrue and the myth, if it ever was a myth, is now an important reality.’Footnote 130
This approach to understanding resettlement, and the reactions of the Chinese ‘race’ to it, was not limited to the Review. It appears to have been shared by other colonial officials who had been trained in the Protectorate in earlier years. O. W. Wolters—a former employee of the Protectorate who was serving in a different section of the colonial bureaucracy at this time but who remained involved in resettlement—wrote in 1951 on the challenges of resettlement of the Chinese as a ‘race which honours the family connection’. For Wolters, as for his former peers who now staffed the Secretariat, familial connections between ‘squatters’ and communist guerrillas were strong because they represented ‘an ancient social habit [that] reinforced the influence of the Communists and helped to create another link between the rural Chinese and the [Communist] Party in the jungle’.Footnote 131
A similar report detailing Chinese traits and their consequences for resettlement was published in the February/March 1950 issue of the Review. This account was inspired, according to the SCA, by the fact that ‘those who dealt with the Chinese during the [Anti-Bandit] Month [of February 1950] were in fact reminded of a number of their characteristics’.Footnote 132 Intriguingly, however, this report called on Chinese affairs knowledge to contradict the assessments that had been reached just a few months earlier in the Review. While the traditional Chinese family system had been used to argue for the futility of expecting ‘squatter’ cooperation with the authorities at the end of 1949, the ‘Chinese social make-up’ was judged in early 1950 to include ‘characteristics which promise some degree of success to the imposition of suitable controls to impede the operations of the “Min yuen” [Min yun]’.Footnote 133 These included: (i) the belief that all Chinese ‘are by nature law-abiding’ and that they ‘prefer not to defy lawful authority’; (ii) ‘the Chinese prefer to submit as a group to outside pressure’; (iii) ‘the Chinese prefer to mind their own business’, and support for the Min Yuen does not come from ‘political conviction but because of the strength of the organisation behind the “Min Yuen”’; and (iv) the Chinese were ‘anxious for peace’ and hence likely to give the authorities their support.Footnote 134
Chinese social norms of the sort that such officials claimed to understand could thus be highlighted both to criticise and support emergency detention and resettlement policy. This lack of consistency—attributing both a lack cooperation and the potential for loyalty on the part of rural Chinese to innate cultural traits—was evident again a few months later. When assessing the results of resettlement in Pahang, the SCA admitted that ‘In fact, no generalisation about the mood of the Chinese rural population would be safe’.Footnote 135
Unsurprisingly, resettlement remained a prominent feature of the Review across 1949, 1950, and 1951. Indeed, as an indication of its importance, many issues devoted entire sections to it, with most of these providing simple, narrative accounts of the progress with regards to the scheme across different parts of Malaya. Yet the Review remained true to its Chinese affairs approach, its authors occasionally even expressing sorrow for the ways in which the scheme was having an impact on the very communities that this group of scholar-officials saw as their remit. One particular case regarding resettlement of ‘the centuries old Hakka colony of Pulai [in the state of Johor]’, published in the April 1951 issue, even betrays a sense of regret about the cultural consequences of the Briggs Plan for the very communities that Chinese affairs officials sought to understand and defend:
It is a pity that this colony, which has remained for so long an individual and independent unit within Malaya, preserving a brand of Hakka which is archaic and almost unintelligible to newcomers should have to be moved, but it seems clear that it is necessary both for the good of the State and for the protection of its inhabitants.Footnote 136
Such sentiments may well have reflected the residual paternalism of the pre-war Protectorate. Yet they also set the Chinese Secretariat apart from other sections of the colonial state and the armed forces. While recent scholarship has shown how the latter, in particular, viewed ‘Chinese squatters as pests, and villages as breeding grounds’,Footnote 137 the Review suggested that Chinese affairs involved the adoption of a far more nuanced and scholarly approach to solving ‘the Chinese problem’—one which evidenced a genuine interest in understanding ‘the Chinese’. ‘To many Government officers’, wrote the SCA in June 1951,
resettlement is a purely physical operation involving the movement of a certain number of families from scattered squatter huts to a concentrated area where fences and police can protect them …. The administrator must however look further than these physical matters of protection and amenities. He must look at the psychological state of the settlers who have been uprooted at considerable sacrifice.Footnote 138
Conclusion: the end of an ‘irritating relic’?
In October 1955—just a few weeks after the decision to discontinue the Review had been taken and as plans were being made to close down the Chinese Secretariat altogetherFootnote 139—Malaya’s final federal SCA, David Gray, wrote urgently to Deputy High Commissioner Donald MacGillivray to underline the fact that the Chinese affairs knowledge that had been developed in Malaya over decades was not being used as extensively as it might be. Emphasising the importance of a unified view on overseas Chinese–related issues throughout the British empire, Gray noted that ‘the Americans have given much more thought to the matter [overseas Chinese affairs] … and we seem to be left behind’.Footnote 140 In Gray’s view, it was
of paramount importance that the British Authorities should have an intimate knowledge of their [overseas Chinese] history, organisation, and political ideas so that any signs of an anti-communist potential or a growing territorial loyalty to their countries of adoption may be noted and stimulated.Footnote 141
The immediate catalyst for this appeal had been an empire-wide audit of Chinese affairs initiated by the Office of the Commissioner General for the United Kingdom in Southeast Asia, as well as the question of what would occur, as Malaya moved towards Merdeka (independence), to Chinese affairs institutions. As Gray noted, it was evident that the geopolitics of the Cold War in Asia had inspired American policymakers to create an entire cohort of China specialists to staff a vast anti-communist network throughout East and Southeast Asia at the very moment that Britain was preparing to withdraw from the region. The now burgeoning academic literature on American-financed efforts to court overseas Chinese communities through print culture, broadcasting, cinema, and academia in the region only confirms what Gray was observing in 1955.Footnote 142
Gray’s appeals went unheeded. The Review was discontinued in 1956, and Gray himself departed Kuala Lumpur in the same year to the sounds of a police band playing Auld Lang Syne.Footnote 143 The local Chinese affairs officers who had served state SCAs through the process of resettlement were integrated into various parts of a rapidly ‘Malayanising’ civil service, and the state SCAs themselves were moved into new roles around Malaya and the empire.
In this article, I have shown the extent to which the Chinese affairs knowledge that had been developed in the pre-war years—originally as a means of understanding and controlling Chinese immigration, labour activism, and secret societies in colonial Malaya—was brought to bear in the prosecution of the emergency. A Chinese affairs bureaucracy was re-formed as the colonial state attempted to use such knowledge to deal, in an ethnogovernmental fashion, with Chinese ‘squatters’ and communist guerrillas via detention and a large-scale resettlement campaign. The reports that were produced in aid of such efforts reflected a distinctly pre-war understanding of ‘the Chinese’ and a paternalistic approach that continually looked to China as well as innate, race-based traits to explain responses to colonial policies in 1940s and 1950s Malaya.
Institutionally, however, Chinese affairs appears to have been the victim of its own success. The federal SCA had argued in 1951 for his own relevance because Chinese affairs benefited ‘that large part of the Chinese population which is still un Malayanised’.Footnote 144 By the mid 1950s, an emerging Malayan political class was calling for the end of Chinese affairs altogether. Various groups within the newly elected Legislative Council in Kuala Lumpur called for the closure of the CAD—an ‘irritating relic’ of colonialism, perhaps referencing the racialised hierarchies that typified Chinese affairs in terms of its administration—while others suggested that the ‘usefulness’ of Chinese affairs institutions ‘may now have come to an end’.Footnote 145 ‘It is obviously undesirable’, argued the Straits Times in October 1955, ‘that when all communities are being encouraged to think of themselves as Malayans, there should be government departments based on the idea that the Chinese are a separate community whose needs and interests require care’.Footnote 146
Chinese affairs in Malaya left no institutional heirs. Victor Purcell continued in post at Cambridge until his death in the 1960s. Retired SCAs such as Wilfred Blythe published some of the ethnographic work that they had first developed while in Malaya in the 1960s and 1970s.Footnote 147 O. W. Wolters went on to lead a long and successful academic career at Cornell University, publishing studies that betrayed distinctly Chinese affairs perspectives.Footnote 148 Yet the knowledge that the Secretariat had produced, both before and during the emergency, was not stored in any subsequent repository. As David Gray had predicted, the tradition of dual-use study of ‘the Chinese’ in Southeast Asia would be carried on mainly via American researchers in the post-emergency years.Footnote 149
Nonetheless, Chinese affairs as a field of knowledge continued to shape many of the ways in which the study of the ‘Malayan Chinese’ was conducted in the years following Merdeka. This was as much the case for scholars who had limited connection to the world of colonial officialdom as it was for those, such as Purcell or Wolters, who claimed Protectorate training. The early work of one of the most widely lauded historians of the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Wang Gungwu, cites the pre-war version of the Review as evidence of generalisations about this community on the part of the colonial authorities. Yet in Wang’s 1970 formulation of a typology of ‘Group A’, ‘Group B’, and ‘Group C’ Chinese—subsets that were defined by their attitudes towards China and the extent of their integration into local society—Wang’s assessment of ‘Chinese politics in Malaya’ followed a path that would have looked remarkably familiar to any researcher at the Secretariat.Footnote 150 Similarly, some of the major works representing the first generation of scholarship on resettlement in Malaya contained ideas that would not have looked out of place in the pages of the Review. ‘The Chinese value harmony and peace’, wrote Judith Strauch in her now classic study of Malaysia’s New Villages undertaken in the 1970s, ‘and they generally believe they can best serve these values by staying out of politics altogether’.Footnote 151 These examples are not mentioned to embarrass their authors. Rather, they are cited to provide evidence of the enduring legacies of an approach that appears to have survived despite the end of colonialism. Such intellectual residue of emergency-era Chinese affairs makes the scholarly disregard for the history and legacies of the field all the more puzzling.Footnote 152
Recent critical reassessments of late-colonial governance in Malaya have shown us how communal divisions that were exacerbated in the 1950s have continued to define Malaysian society today.Footnote 153 Chinese affairs both reflected and contributed to such divisions and was an integral (though increasingly marginalised) part of a colonial system that sought to racially categorise Malayan society. In acknowledging the inherent problems in such an approach, however, we can also note that Chinese affairs outputs such as the Review included diasporic, transnational, and culturalist assessments that—in light of scholarly debates over the last two decades about the ‘Sinophone’, ‘diaspora’, and ‘Chineseness’,Footnote 154 many of which parallel, or at least echo, debates amongst Chinese affairs officials about ‘China mindedness’ and ‘Malayanisation’ in the 1950s—still appear remarkably relevant today, regardless of the old-fashioned language in which they were presented. With this in mind, it is perhaps time not simply to consider the ‘paternalist anachronism’ of Chinese affairs as a form of ethnogovernmentality but also to acknowledge the significance of this body of knowledge within wider studies of the Malayan/Malaysian Chinese in later years—and perhaps even the potential that Chinese affairs texts like the Review have to provide a more nuanced interpretation of the colonial state’s attempt to understand rural Malayan society during the emergency.
Acknowledgements
Some of the research for this paper was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/Z507349/1]. Sections of the paper were also presented at the Popular Nanyang: Re-Thinking Chinese Cultures in Post-War Singapore and Malaya/Malaysia Conference held at the Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre in November 2023.
Conflicts of interest
None.
