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Malaya: Revolution and its Abandonment
My Side
of History by Chin Peng (Media Masters; Singapore, 2003)
By S.R.
Throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Malaya witnessed many a
protracted and arduous struggle against colonial domination and
semi-feudal oppression by its people, who are composed of many nationalities2.
Yet in November 1969 new and startling events aroused the nation,
the poor and exploited in particular. Politics in Malaya suddenly
appeared exciting. The news came like a breath of fresh air, sweeping
the country, from drab factory floors to vibrant green fields, from
campus hostels to prison cells. A great anticipation gripped the
land as the Voice of the Malayan Revolution radio, broadcast from
then revolutionary People's China, told the deprived and downtrodden
of heroic battles being fought and won by the guerrilla fighters
of the Malayan National Liberation Army, giving new hope to the
hopeless. The rebel radio, Suara Revolusi (in Malay), as it came
to be known, announced the first statement in a long time by the
Communist Party of Malaya, "Hold Aloft the Great Red Banner of Armed
Struggle and March Valiantly Forward!" This revival in the revolutionary
armed struggle marked the twentieth anniversary of the first shots
fired against Britain in its colonial possession, which had signalled
the long war for national liberation. Throughout the greater part
of the 1970s, the nation remained abuzz with expectancy as regular
news and analysis never heard before crackled over the airwaves.
Since its birth,
the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) had been in the thick of the
struggle for liberation. But since the passing of Mao Tsetung in
1976 and the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR)
in China, the revolutionary struggle in Malaya had been winding
down. Little was heard from the CPM leadership from that time until
very recently. It was only towards the end of the 1990s that the
CPM leaders broke their long silence to let the world know their
version of the protracted and tragic saga of the Malayan revolutionary
movement. Abdullah Che Dat ("CD"), the Chairman of the CPM, and
his wife, a Central Committee member, Eng Ming Ching, alias Suraini
Abdullah, have both chronicled their side of events in 1998 and
1999, respectively. Their books, in the Malay language, Perang Anti-British
dan Perdamaian (The Anti-British War and Peace) by Abdullah CD (Nan
Dao publisher, Hong Kong, 1998), and Suraini's Rejimen Ke-10 dan
Kemerdekaan (Independence and the Tenth Regiment) by the same publisher,
are, however, banned by the Malaysian government and, therefore,
not available to the people in Malaya.
Chin Peng (Chinese
name, Chen Ping), the Secretary of the Party and its de facto leader
since 1947, published his My Side of History in September 2003.
This is in some ways an authoritative narrative of events, containing
many very interesting anecdotes, but also his apologetics as well
as frank admissions of his, and the Party's, failings. Like Abdullah
CD and Suraini, unfortunately, Chin Peng throws little light on
the CPM's understanding of the communist ideology and the Party's
political line, which supposedly guided the activities of the Party
- and this in itself is telling. It should also be mentioned that
for several decades of the period when Chen Ping was head of the
Party - from 1959 to 1989 - he lived in China. This period included
the tumultuous years of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
(GPCR), giving Chen Ping an exceptional vantage point to report
on the earthshaking events of that time - including a personal interview
with Mao Tsetung - yet My Side readers with high expectations of
analysis of these events will come away sorely disappointed.
A Historical
Overview of the CPM
Malaysia today
has a population of more than 20 million, made up mainly of Malays,
Chinese and Indians3. There are also small numbers of aboriginal
peoples living in the jungles or in the fringes of the jungle as
tribal communities practicing shifting cultivation, as well as hunting,
trapping and fishing. During the colonial period, the bulk of the
Malay people lived in the countryside as small farmers and peasants.
Malay society was highly differentiated in terms of power structures,
with the Sultans at its summit. These feudal rulers were subrogated
to the British rulers who had deprived them of any real power over
the people. They were no more than figureheads. Malay society was
an agrarian society, with landlords and peasants, including many
tenant farmers. There was no industry, hence scarcely any bourgeoisie
and proletarians. With the advent of British colonialism, feudal
Malaya had been turned into a colonial and semi-feudal society.
Beginning in the nineteenth century Chinese migrant workers were
brought into Malaya by the British in large numbers, so much so
that the Chinese formed the largest single ethnic group in Malaya
until the 1950s.
The Communist
Party of Malaya (CPM) was founded in April 1930 in a small village
near Kuala Pilah in the State of Negri Sembilan. Prior to its establishment,
it had been organised as the southern overseas branch of the Communist
Party of China (CPC), the Nanyang Communist Party (South Seas Communist
Party in Mandarin). It was built almost entirely by Chinese immigrant
workers and those who took flight from persecution in China, especially
following the 1927 counter-revolutionary carnage carried out by
Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (Nationalist) Party. Following a decision
of the Shanghai-based Far East Bureau of the Comintern, the first
Party Congress was held and on 30 April 1930, the CPM was officially
founded. Ho Chi Minh, the famous Vietnamese revolutionary and a
key figure in the founding of the Indo-Chinese communist movement,
was one of the Comintern representatives at this Congress.
In its early
years, the CPM functioned as an underground organisation and experienced
enormous hardships and severe repression at the hands of the British
colonial authorities in Malaya. Arrests of Party members, suspected
members, and sympathisers were frequent. In Singapore alone, for
example, in a five-year period between 1931 and 1935, there were
432 police raids on CPM members' homes and their hiding places.
While a large number of those arrested were deported to China, local
prisons were also filled. Amidst the repression, the Party was nevertheless
able to make progress in organising workers in plantations, mines
and the transport system, as well as among students from Chinese
schools, that is, schools using Mandarin as a medium of instruction.
At the outset
of the Western imperialist Pacific War against Japan, which coincided
with Hitler's Operation Barbarossa against the then socialist Soviet
Union, the CPM made overtures to the British colonial authorities,
offering to jointly resist Japan's conquest of Asia in return for
the release of its members from British jails. This was the period
of British-CPM collaboration, when the CPM hurriedly organised the
Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) to carry out "behind
enemy lines" guerrilla operations against the new occupiers of the
country, the Japanese. Britain offered to arm and train Malayan
resistance fighters in guerrilla raids, ambushes and sabotage. This
arrangement lasted from 1941 to 1945, that is, during the Second
World War.
When the Second
World War ended (1945), Britain reoccupied Malaya, but owing to
a capitulationist line laid down by the then secretary general,
Lai Te, a secret agent of both Japanese and British intelligence,
a fact that was later uncovered by the Party Central Committee,
the CPM carried out a policy of co-operation with the British colonialists.
In 1947 the CPM leadership exposed and eliminated the British spy,
but the capitulationism that marked the line of the Party leadership
continued to prevail. The CPM never subjected its ideological-political
underpinnings to any thorough-going two-line struggle against its
non-proletarian, reformist political line. But it was at its worst
in the immediate post-war years (1945-48), when the CPM considered
the adoption of an economist programme, and trade unionism in particular,
to be the best possible option in this period. Chin Peng, nevertheless,
concerned mainly with prestige and numbers, declares that it was
this period when the CPM was at its strongest. The British Military
Administration then ruthlessly suppressed the CPM (which by then
had succeeded in recruiting sections of the working class and the
peasantry from the Malay and Indian nationalities too) and the Party-controlled/
influenced mass organisations. By mid-1948, it had become impossible
for the Party to function openly, and it was once again compelled
to go underground.
Between 1948
and 1959 the CPM once again launched a guerrilla war against the
British colonialists, who had reoccupied the country after the Second
World War. This war was called the Anti-British National Liberation
War by the CPM, but it was termed the Emergency (1948-60) by the
British rulers and later by the colonial puppet regimes in Kuala
Lumpur and Singapore, to which power was "transferred" in 1957 and
1965 respectively. In the Anti-British War period, Britain employed
not only its elite armed forces, but also twenty-four other mercenary
battalions made up of troops from Fiji, Africa, and Australia, as
well as Ghurkha soldiers from Nepal. In addition to these, several
Malay regiments of the British puppet army, auxiliary militarised
police and "home guards" from the local populace, were press-ganged
to fight against Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA) regulars
of (at most) 8,000 men and women, who were supported by approximately
60,000 Min Yuen (CPM mass organisation) members. British imperialism
employed air strikes, artillery fire-power, tanks, armoured military
vehicles, and the whole range of the latest in modern weaponry against
the CPM. The British counter-insurgency campaign was accompanied
by the most savage of military tactics against the mainly civilian
population in the countryside.
It was the
most unequal of contests, yet Britain never succeeded in totally
crushing the rebellion. But, cut off from its support base of the
rural civilian population, which was forcefully evacuated from their
dispersed and tiny squatter farms and concentrated in so-called
new villages and placed under constant guard and barbed wire by
the British Military Administration, the MNLA fighters found themselves
isolated deep in the jungles of Malaya. It was against this background
that the Party leadership decided to retreat north of the border
and set up base camps in southern Thailand. So demonised was Chin
Peng (branded as the leader of "communist terrorists" and the "most
wanted man in the British Empire"), who had a price on his head
throughout this period, that people spoke his name only in whispers.
In 1955, Chin
Peng led a negotiating panel at the much talked about Baling Peace
Talks. Chin Peng and his negotiating team felt compelled to walk
out of the talks, as the British puppet "chief minister" of Malaya,
Tunku Abdul Rahman, demanded the total surrender of the CPM. In
1975, in looking back at this period, the Party was to admit its
own errors in pursuing a right-opportunist line - "peaceful transition
to socialism" and the illusions of parliamentary politics - (influenced
from abroad by Khrushchev and Liu Shao-chi) from the mid-1950s till
1961.
The CPM re-launched
its guerrilla war against "independent" Malaya, which from the mid-1960s
was called Malaysia. This time, against the backdrop of the Cultural
Revolution in China and a series of humiliating defeats suffered
by the US forces at the hands of the Vietnamese people, a period
of high tide in the struggle against US-led imperialism world-wide,
the CPM proclaimed a revolutionary armed struggle for national liberation
to accomplish the "new-democratic revolution" in Malaya. The Party
declared its adherence to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought and
proclaimed that it was "the vanguard of the proletariat and the
highest body of the organised proletariat" as well as the "nucleus"
that "leads the Malayan revolution" against "imperialism, feudalism
and bureaucratic capitalism" (The New Constitution of the CPM, May
1972). Moreover, the Party this time claimed that it was correcting
its right-opportunist errors of the past, and as in other neo/semi-colonial,
semi-feudal countries of the Third World, taking the road of protracted
people's war, the road of surrounding the cities from the countryside
and seizing country-wide political power by armed force.
Between 1967
and 1977 the mass media in the country was full of stories of armed
raids and ambushes carried out by the CPM-led Malayan National Liberation
Army (MNLA) against the armed police force and the military of what
the Party then called the "puppet regime" of imperialism, principally
British imperialism. From 1969 on, daily radio broadcasts of the
Party, Suara Revolusi Malaya (The Voice of the Malayan Revolution),
operating from Hunan in southern China, reported news of battles
and victories and setbacks, as well as the Party's analysis of events
and the domestic and world situation. These broadcasts, in Malay,
(Mandarin) Chinese, Tamil, English as well as several non-Mandarin
Chinese dialects, greatly inspired many people from all nationalities
and walks of life. Revolutionary-minded youth, especially from among
young Chinese Malayans of proletarian background, flocked to the
then MNLA and MNLF (Malayan National Liberation Front) in ever-growing
numbers. This was taking place despite fierce repression under "emergency
rule" - deprivation of even the most basic of civil liberties, which
could mean indefinite imprisonment without trial simply for possession
of revolutionary literature, or even summary execution and disappearance
if captured in areas of military operations by the "Malaysian" or
Thai "security forces".
The GPCR in
China, then sending shock waves and a deep-seated apprehension of
a revolutionary upsurge among the powerful and the privileged world-wide
and at the same time igniting hope and confidence among the oppressed
and the exploited, undoubtedly also influenced events in Malaysia.
The essence of revolutionary China's support meant that it provided
the proletariat in Malaya, as throughout the world, with the ideological-political
wherewithal for the gathering storms. Right-opportunist or revisionist
influences/trends in left-wing organisations were struggled against
and positions and standpoints laid bare in many countries, and to
some extent this was also true in Malaysia, including within the
CPM. Parliamentary politics, bourgeois elections and trade unionism
were subjected to intense criticism up and down Peninsula Malaya
and in Singapore. Chairman Mao Tsetung's exhortations, "it is right
to rebel against reactionaries", "political power grows out of the
barrel of a gun", "without a people's army, the people have nothing",
and "nothing is impossible if you dare to scale the heights", all
found ready resonance among young hearts in Malaya as in other countries.
Following the
death of Mao and the counter-revolutionary coup in China in 1976,
however, the level of armed combat against the Malaysian armed forces
dropped drastically and petered out from the second half of the
1970s through the "lost decade" of the 1980s. In 1989 the Party
leadership made a formal decision to end the armed struggle altogether,
culminating with an agreement to end armed hostilities between the
Malaysian government and the CPM. This agreement, brokered by the
Thai government, included the formal recognition by the Party of
the feudal king as well as of the imperialist lackey government
of "Malaysia".
British
Counter-Insurgency: Two Sides, Two Histories
A great deal
has been written about the so-called Emergency, mostly by British
historians sympathetic to the colonial point of view and by British
former military officers in their memoirs. The writings of British
counter-insurgency experts on their "Malayan campaign", such as
Kitson and Thompson, were, and are still, hailed as a "great success
story" and given substantial media and academic attention, often
as a lesson in contrast with the failings of the US war in Vietnam.
Some British officers had organised a clandestine armed force, known
as Force 136, which collaborated with the CPM-led Malayan People's
Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) in covert operations against Japanese
rule in Malaya (in the Second World War, known as the Pacific War).
Chin Peng was the CPM's cadre liaising with British secret agents
in war-torn Malaya then. Chin Peng's My Side of History, hence,
gives the readers a fascinating first-hand account from a passionate
partisan fighter's point of view of events, great and small.
Other writings
on this period were by British officers, civilian and military.
John Cross (Red Jungle, London, 1957) and Spencer Chapman (The Jungle
is Neutral, London, 1949) were British army intelligence officers
who had stayed behind (Japanese) "enemy lines" and had worked with
MPAJA guerrillas. They have both written inside stories of the anti-Japanese
guerrilla war, which are fairly unbiased, at least racially, and
give detailed and accurate descriptions of CPM cadres in their secret
jungle camps. But as a rule, these colonial memoirs are extremely
triumphalist in style.
While most
such writings gloat over Britain's triumph over the CPM, invariably
praising the draconian measures in "combating the 'communist terrorists'",
there are exceptions: the analysis by John Newsinger (lecturer in
history, Bath University) of the Japanese occupation period and
the "Emergency" years in his article, "The Military Memoir in British
Imperial Culture: The Case of Malaya", which appeared in the radical
journal Race & Class, 35, 3 (1994), thoroughly exposes British
war crimes against the Malayan people. In this respect, Chin Peng's
My Side of History is at its best in laying bare the horror and
brutality that accompanied the suppression of the rebellion, including
the forced evacuation of half a million poor rural residents of
Chinese decent and their concentration into the so-called new villages.
It is often claimed that this infamous undertaking, known as the
"Briggs Plan" (after General Harold Briggs, the new director of
operations in 1951), coupled with relentless jungle operations in
pursuit of CPM guerrillas, "turned the tide" against the Party's
anti-British war effort. Despite the much-vaunted "winning the hearts
and minds" rhetoric in the writings of most British and pro-colonial
historians and journalists, outrages and atrocities against unarmed
civilians by the British army were common occurrences. Accompanying
the ruthless military approach, which included beheading prisoners
and massacring civilians, was the "divide-and-rule" political strategy
that undoubtedly did contribute to isolating the guerrilla army,
which was made up mainly of ethnic Chinese in the jungle, thus cutting
off their food supply and their "eyes and ears" from among the vast
Malay peasantry and Indian plantation workers.
Even among
those somewhat sympathetic to the people, harping on Britain's "enlightened"
approach to waging counter-revolutionary wars has been commonplace.
Some historians, such as Newsinger, hold that the CPM should never
have resorted to armed struggle, one-sidedly focusing on the CPM's
political-military disadvantages, which they claim sooner or later
made inevitable Britain's "success" in "quelling the communist revolt".
For those yearning to fully comprehend the history of the Malayan
revolutionary movement, the picture available so far is necessarily
a very partial one.
So up to now,
a more comprehensive rendering of the "Emergency" years and the
later period of armed struggle (1966-76) dealing with the crucial
ideological-political dimension, principally the question of the
CPM's political line, had yet to be written. The Party leadership
had been mostly silent, save for occasional statements and a brief
outline of the CPM's history ("The Brilliant and Militant Course
of the Communist Party of Malaya", 1975), and despite its opportunity
to broadcast its views over the Suara Revolusi radio service.
My Side of
History is not a history of the Communist Party of Malaya, nor,
as Chen Ping concedes, a thorough-going account of the Emergency.
In his own words, it is simply his "recorded journey", a "dream"
he had "for his country". Chin Peng says that his generation "dreamed
of doing away with British colonialism in Malaya. I am proud of
this fact." Unquestionably it was right to fight to end colonialism,
but why was it necessary for a communist party to lead this endeavour?
My Side of History unfortunately does not even give a clue. To do
so would entail class analysis - which Chin Peng shuns - of Malayan
society under British colonial rule.
Chin Peng reveals
that Marxist philosophical works, Mao's military writings, particularly
"On Protracted War", and Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China (all loaned
to him by a school teacher), greatly influenced his early years
before he was recruited into the Party. But how did he apply his
book learning to the realities of Malaya? How did he come to break
from narrow nationalism and embrace internationalism, class struggle
and social revolution under conditions of a foreign occupation?
How did he see the (class) character of Malayan society? What did
his Party consider the most effective way to unite the Malayan people
of all nationalities and mobilise them for a revolutionary war in
overthrowing all forms of oppression? How did the CPM leadership
view the enemy's divide-and-rule racial policy and overcome its
many political ruses? How did the Party hope to apply the mass line
of Mao Tsetung in the countryside when its support base (mainly
ethnic Chinese) was being cut off from the guerrilla army? How did
it expect its MNLA guerrilla fighters to swim like fish in the sea
of the masses of people? Moreover, how did the Party view important
inner-party contradictions and struggles? Did the CPM leadership
ever view the two-line political struggle as dynamic, as the motive
force propelling the Party forward? And how did the CPM leadership
break from the rightist political line of the period before it came
to adopt its general line for the new-democratic revolution? These,
and other crucial questions, beg for answers.
Chin Peng's
reasons for joining the CPM rather than the Kuomintang (which also
had a sizeable presence in British Malaya) were largely influenced
by the rapidly moving chain of events in China itself at that time.
This is understandable given the highly segregated nature of Malayan
society then, in which there was very little interaction among the
different nationalities. It was widely felt (particularly by the
Chinese communities up and down Peninsula Malaya and Singapore)
that the Kuomintang in China (under Chiang Kai-shek) was offering
little or no resistance to Japan's invasion of China. Indeed, Chin
Peng says that he had even mulled over the idea of going to China
to join the war of resistance against Japan. As events turned out,
while he was still a school student, he became increasingly involved
in the CPM-initiated and led "Anti-Enemy Backing-up Society", which
was meant to build up following and support for the anti-Japanese
war effort in Malaya.
Chin Peng's
account of the CPM's anti-Japanese war and the treachery of the
nefarious secret police-agent, Lai Te, make gripping reading, but
despite the treachery, it is here, during this period, that one
is truly able to appreciate the Party members' and supporters' enormous
contribution to the "liberation of Malaya". What now appears so
striking is the fact that Lai Te, throughout the Anti-Japanese War,
repeatedly betrayed his Party's Central Committee members to Japanese
military intelligence, and yet no senior CPM member thought of questioning
his (Lai Te's) directives. But the Party's ready capitulation to
Britain following this war raises fundamental questions about its
understanding of revolution, as well as about its proletarian class
character. Lack of ideological-political clarity in the Party leadership
(in a turbulent world then) gave rise to its blindness as to what
its central task was even then: waging a war of national liberation
and accomplishing the tasks of the new-democratic revolution. This
was so even after Lai Te was exposed and eliminated. The CPM deemed
that a war of national liberation from British rule was untenable
and hence unnecessary from 1945 till 1948. Hence, the Party continued
to hold that "legal" labour organising and the building of mass
organisations was the only option that would enable it to maintain
its open and legal existence. It followed Lai Te's line without
Lai Te.
In around May
1948, when the CPM leadership, by then led by Chin Peng, decided
to "go underground" and carry out armed struggle against British
rule, it did so because it felt compelled to do so rather than with
a clear communist understanding that the proletariat must seize
political power through armed force, and that the only justification
for the existence of a communist party is to serve this objective
and place the class (the proletariat) it leads in power. Nothing
in My Side of History brings this central task of a proletarian
party to the fore. Yet the crying need of the hour is letting the
reader understand why, and how, the revolutionary attempt at, not
only national liberation, but also transformation of society in
Malaya came to be ended, indeed abandoned, so that future liberation
fighters can learn to avoid pitfalls and surmount difficulties.
One cannot but conclude that this is an abandonment on the part
of the CPM leadership of its responsibility for the generations
to come. Coming from a person of Chin Peng's stature, moreover,
this great absence of communist ideology - and the failure to apply
the science of revolution to dissect the complexities of a nation
of different nationalities with different languages and diverse
cultures as well as social classes and strata and to arm the masses
of people to better grasp its methodology - is all the more disappointing.
Negation
of Socialist Experience in Revolutionary China
"If China's
leadership is usurped by revisionists in the future, the Marxist-Leninists
of all countries should resolutely expose and fight them and help
the working class and the masses of China to combat such revisionism."
- Mao Tsetung, 1965.
In the years
following the death of Chairman Mao and the defeat of the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, that is, with the arrest
of the four principal leaders of the proletarian revolutionary headquarters,
Chiang Ching, Chang Chun-chao, Wang Hung-wen and Yao Wen-yuan, very
little was heard from the CPM on China, and on learning from the
revolutionary experience there. What the CPM did do was hail Hua
Kuo-feng as a "wise leader", which signalled at best the Party's
confusion on the two roads - capitalism versus socialism - in China,
and indicated serious weaknesses in its grasp of what was then called
Marxism - Leninism - Mao Tsetung Thought, and particularly on the
lessons from the GPCR about continuing the revolution under the
dictatorship of the proletariat and class struggle throughout the
socialist period. Indeed, virtually nothing was heard about China
and the struggle against modern revisionism from then on.
Even as late
as in 1998, the new CPM Chairman, Abdullah CD, makes hardly any
mention of the international situation in any period. His wife,
Suraini, makes some remarks about "Socialist China" in her defence
of revisionist China, that is, since Mao's passing. This is in her
attack on a former CPM Chairman, Musa Ahmad.
Musa Ahmad
was actually an anti-British Malay nationalist in post-war Malaya
who later joined the CPM prior to the Emergency. He was also a prominent
leader of the CPM-led Malayan Peasant Front. Musa was later sent
to China by the Party in the difficult years when the MNLA suffered
some military setbacks in the late 1950s. In October 1980, Musa
decided to quit the Party and return to Malaya. He later went on
to denounce communism, the Party and the armed struggle.
Suraini went
on to claim in her book that Musa had supported the so-called "Gang
of Four", led by Chiang Ching, "when the Great Cultural Revolution
exploded", and that Musa was "encouraged" by the Four in his "despicable
anti-PKM [CPM] activities". Here, one gathers that the CPM considered
revisionist China to be socialist (pp. 180-186) in 1999 since Suraini
alleges that Musa had "slandered the Communist Party of China and
socialist China".
Chin
Peng on the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
Official statements
of the CPM had been full of praise for the Cultural Revolution in
China at the time it was being waged. On 1 June 1968, that is, on
the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the
anti-British national liberation war, and on 25 April 1970, on the
fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Party, the CPM issued
statements, rallying the Malayan people to vigorously unfold a revolutionary
movement to support the MNLA efforts to carry out the armed struggle
against imperialist puppet rule. These Party statements hailed the
GPCR. Indeed, in the course of an analysis of China's new relations
with Malaya, in 1974 the CPM declared, "After being tempered in
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, socialist China has become
stronger than ever before. Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary
line and revolutionary line on foreign affairs have won great victories.
China has achieved brilliant success in socialist revolution and
construction. As an impregnable revolutionary bastion, China is
now making an increasingly important contribution to world revolution"
(cited in Broadsheet, China Policy Study Group, Britain, August
1974).
The Cultural
Revolution in China was often described as having stirred the very
soul of the Chinese nation and revolutionary-minded people the world
over. What was at stake then was the very existence of not only
a liberated segment of humanity, but indeed a red beacon for the
downtrodden of the earth, yearning for a better world. Chin Peng
reveals little of his activities while he was in China from 1959
till 1989, including during the GPCR period. No one living in China
then could have remained untouched by the tumultuous events, and
this was apparently the case with Chin Peng too. Yet in his recollections,
how little does he write about the Cultural Revolution! He and other
CPM leaders based in China then had met with Chairman Mao Tsetung
during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution. Chin Peng informs
that Mao in 1967 not only asked him about how the party-to-party
talks (between the CPM and the CPC) had gone, but also "significantly
wanted to talk to us about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution".
Yet Chin Peng does not say what Mao told him about the GPCR and
what his views were then. He remarks only that, "I quickly gained
the impression Mao had become quite isolated from his party's leadership"
(p. 447). It is clear from this remark and his observation that
the CPC Cultural Revolution Committee led by Kang Sheng had become
more powerful than the Chou En-lai-led Party Central Committee Secretariat
that he saw that Mao had become politically, if not ideologically,
estranged from the likes of Chou En-lai and Deng Xiao-ping.
Chin Peng then
speaks of "an overflow of madness from the Cultural Revolution"
influencing his party (p. 468). This is how he saw the Cultural
Revolution in China: not as laying bare the internal contradictions
of a socialist society and openly engaging in open debates and struggle
that would determine the future course of development in China,
that is, whether or not China would continue along the socialist
revolutionary road or take the capitalist road and restore capitalism,
not as a life-and-death titanic struggle over the general line of
the Communist Party in the socialist period, but as "turmoil" and
"madness".
Chin Peng argues
that the "overflow of madness from the Cultural Revolution& saw
waves of paranoia surging through our four camps" in the Malayan-Thai
border region. Thus, for Chin Peng the GPCR represented not the
unleashing of the masses to boldly debate the life-and-death questions
of society and state, not the masses increasing their ability to
distinguish the correct, that is, the proletarian, from the incorrect
bourgeois political line (in the socialist transition period) and
daring to question authority when it is taking the capitalist road,
but simply as factional fights, "paranoia", "emotion" and "madness",
just as all reactionaries (including revisionists) as well as the
imperialist powers and their media, would have the world believe.
As schools
and colleges were sporadically closed during a large part of the
Cultural Revolution years, Chin Peng was mainly concerned with the
school education of his and other CPM leaders' children then residing
in China. He was running around trying to arrange night schools
for the children of senior Party leaders in Hunan province from
where the CPM broadcast Suara Revolusi. Chin Peng tells us now that
he was "caught up in the quagmire of the Cultural Revolution".
On school and
university students going to factories and the collective farms
in the countryside to learn from the workers and peasants, he is
silent in My Side of History. What does this tell us about the CPM
leadership's understanding of China's youth passionately involving
themselves in the affairs of the (proletarian) state and immersing
themselves in class struggle? Obviously Chin Peng was greatly troubled
by the "turmoil" attendant on the intense struggles of the day in
China, but had he been paying heed to Chairman Mao's call for remoulding
the world outlook of the youth and students through direct participation
in productive labour and the class struggle? How much of Mao's insistence
that while its task was to overthrow the capitalist-roaders, the
goal of the Cultural Revolution was to bring about a change in the
world outlook of the masses of the people, had actually sunk in
on the CPM leadership stationed in revolutionary China then?
How then does
Chin Peng view post-Mao China and Deng Xiao-ping's Four Modernisations?
"&It was also during 1978 that Deng launched his monumentally ambitious
Four Modernisations' campaign which looked to stunning advances
for China in agriculture, industry, science and technology and defence."
Not a word here about Mao's criticism of Deng's view that, "black
cat or white cat, as long as it catches the mice it's a good cat"
- meaning that anything that raised production was good, which amounted
to a pragmatic recipe for liquidating the fight for revolution and
thus restoring capitalism. On looking back, the CPM leadership's
failure to expose and fight the capitalist road taken by Deng and
his clique and its refusal to help the working class and the masses
of the Chinese people combat revisionism should come as no surprise.
What it entailed was turning away from the CPM's bounden internationalist
duty so earnestly exhorted by Mao of communists the world over.
The CPM, it
is now quite apparent, must have viewed the life-and-death struggle
between the proletarian revolutionary headquarters led by Mao and
the so-called "Gang of Four" on the one hand, and the whole alliance
of revisionists and capitalist-roaders (Chou En-lai, Deng Xiao-ping,
Li Hsien-nian, Yeh Ching-ying and Hua Kuo-feng) on the other, in
a somewhat centrist light to say the least. Without such centrism
on the vital two-line struggle it would not have been possible for
the Party to move rightward, become revisionist and really fall
apart so soon after the death of Mao Tsetung.
Failure to
grasp the centrality of the two-line struggle means failure to grasp
Mao's teaching that contradictions are found everywhere, including
in even a truly communist party. And moreover that the two aspects
of the principal contradiction in a proletarian party in contention
are the reactionary bourgeois line and the revolutionary proletarian
line, representing the capitalist road and the socialist road throughout
the entire period of socialism. This failure to understand the "kernel
of dialectics" means ignoring the centrality of Marxist philosophy
in a party's life. Inevitably this has led to revisionism, and indeed,
open abandonment of revolution and acceptance of the status quo.
Centrism:
the Prelude to Revisionism and Abandonment of Revolution What does
the CPM leadership's about-turn on the GPCR tell us?
It seems clear
that pragmatism and centrism must have prevailed in the leadership
of the CPM even during the years when the Party was supposed to
have cleansed itself of erroneous and right-opportunist influences
and "established a proletarian revolutionary line" since 1961. The
CPM leadership felt that it needed a safe "rear" to function, and
revolutionary China provided this "rear". The CPM accordingly supported
China's every move, through every twist and turn of events, during
the high tide as well as the low, but it is very questionable as
to how much its leadership really grasped the issues of line that
they commented on or how firmly they upheld proletarian internationalism,
or how much they were instead proceeding from their own more narrow
interests. This becomes clear soon after Mao's death, when the dust
settled following the arrest and imprisonment of the leaders of
the proletarian revolutionary headquarters (the so-called Gang of
Four), led by Chiang Ching and Chang Chun-chiao. Did the CPM "dare
to go against the tide" when China's revisionist leaders seized
power and betrayed the revolution and socialism? How could one explain
the CPM leadership's adherence to proletarian internationalism when
it failed to come to the aid of the masses in China by denouncing
the triumph of the capitalist-roaders and the restoration of capitalism?
As a matter of fact, the CPM leadership welcomed the victory of
the "unrepentant" capitalist-roaders and their assumption of power.
The CPM's centrism on the many issues pertaining to the struggle
between the reactionary bourgeois line and the proletarian revolutionary
line in China, between the socialist road and the capitalist road,
between nationalism and internationalism, inevitably led in this
new situation to the abandonment of the revolutionary line and of
the armed struggle in Malaya too.
Chin Peng's
leadership reveals slavishness in the CPM. Slavishness in regards
to the Party's international relations with the Communist Party
of China also meant slavishness within the Party, which stifled
the life-blood of the Party and obstructed the lively political
debate and two-line struggle essential to revitalising the dynamism
of the Party organisation at various levels. Such is the Maoist
view on the life of a communist party. Failure to grasp this really
means failure to understand in a deep-going way that contradictions
are present everywhere; it means failure to truly understand the
law of dialectics and apply it to the workings of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
party. The monolithic view of a communist party that prevailed under
Chin Peng's leadership of the CPM, hence, turned its membership
from fearless and lively revolutionary fighters into slavish followers
of the Party leadership. The Party members' ability to distinguish
between revolution and reformism, between internationalism and nationalism,
corroded, and the revolutionary spark that had originally impelled
the Party forward gradually extinguished. Hence, a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist
party could rapidly change to a revisionist party, communist in
name, but bourgeois in essence.
Inner-Party
Struggle, Factions and Splits
In the early
1970s, just as the CPM's guerrilla army was making progress in its
advances southwards from its south Thailand border camps, there
broke out accusations and charges of treason and espionage in the
base camps. A large number of Party members, including some Central
Committee (CC) members, were charged with treason or accused of
being police spies, and were executed in the base camps in southern
Thailand. Chin Peng relates these events, particularly mentioning
the names of some of his old comrades from the anti-Japanese war
and the anti-British colonial war with a great deal of sorrow. Though
he is not convinced of the accusations (against so many of his Party
members and old comrades), he does not take any responsibility for
these events.
Two of the
camps in West Betong and Sadao (in southern Thailand) close to the
Malayan border even broke away from the CPM and formed separate
parties: the CPM Marxist/Leninist and the CPM (Revolutionary Faction).
Both these factions considered the CC led by Chin Peng to be "revisionist"
but nothing emerges from Chin Peng's My Side of History concerning
the central questions of ideology and the basic political line for
the new-democratic revolution in Malaya. Indeed, the only hint about
the ideological-political line of these factions in the book is
a reference to their surrender to the Thai authorities in 1987,
only two years before Chin Peng signed a "peace agreement" with
the Malaysian and Thai regimes, bringing the armed struggle to an
end.
In a healthy,
vibrant communist party different ideas and lines clash, leading
to one prevailing over the other and thereby enabling the advance
of the party as a whole. The monolithic understanding on party unity
prevalent in the CPM, however, led to fear in expressing dissenting
views and hence covered up the existence of different ideas concerning
the application of a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line on new-democratic
revolution and people's war in Malaya. In the event of some successful
operation by the enemy(ies), such as the capture of some cadres
or the disruption of communication lines between guerrilla fighters
and underground supporters, suspicion of infiltration by enemy spies
by senior Party cadres and CC members in the headquarters of the
Party led to trials (without appeals) and executions. This in turn
led to further accusations and counter-accusations between the camps
the CC directly controlled and those it did not.
Could these
developments have obscured the emergence of opposing lines and line
struggle in the Party, reflecting long-held views (counter to those
of the CC), doubts concerning the armed struggle and the new-democratic
revolution and the attendant pent-up dissatisfactions concerning
the Party leadership's style of work intermingled with opposition
to the then campaign to "weed out and eliminate" enemy agents taking
place? Chin Peng seems to admit this when he says that the problems
were "deep-set". But he does not reveal anything more about this.
Deng's
Betrayal of Fraternal Parties
As Chin Peng
relates, Deng Xiao-ping had been "encouraging" him to "seek avenues
for a peace accord" with the reactionary bureaucrat-capitalist regime
of Malaysia since 1981. In the same year Deng summoned Chin Peng
to his office and bluntly told him to wind down the Suara Revolusi
radio operations in southern China. Chin Peng had no option but
to comply. Earlier that year Deng had ordered the Communist Party
of Thailand's (CPT) Voice of the Free Thai People to shut down its
radio station.
Deng's reason
for these measures was that China needed to seek accommodation with
imperialism and all the client states of imperialism in south-east
Asia, the US-led band of Western imperialism in particular. This
stood in stark contrast to Mao's continued and firm support for
revolutionary struggles around the world, even at the time that,
under his leadership, China had begun to "open up to the West".
As the US's
imperialist rival, the Soviet Union, backed Vietnam, which had invaded
and occupied Cambodia in 1978, Deng considered that China needed
to align herself with the US and other Western imperialist powers.
This was in accordance with Deng's Three Worlds Theory, which saw
the Soviet Union as a threat to China, and presented the view that
Soviet hegemony and expansion of its might and influence world-wide
alone was the real threat to world peace, and which subordinated
everything to the anti-Soviet struggle. Thus, improvement of relations
with pro-US Thailand and other neo/semi-colonial states in the region,
such as Malaysia, was important for China's military support for
the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, as the eastern part of Thailand served
as a conduit for Chinese arms delivery. Against this highly volatile
political scenario and fast-moving events, the pro-Peking (Beijing)
communist parties carrying out armed struggle in south-east Asia,
such as the CPM, the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) and the Burma
Communist Party (BCP), became mere pawns in the power struggle between
the rival imperialist blocs, and of less and less importance to
China's new revisionist rulers.
These developments
were taking place against a backdrop of the regrouping of truly
revolutionary communist Maoist forces around the world. The Revolutionary
Internationalist Movement (RIM), founded in 1984 on defence of the
revolutionary contributions of Mao, defiantly upheld the GPCR in
China and set out to beat back the revisionist wind then blowing
across the communist world and raise the red banner of revolutionary
internationalism. Deng's capitalist road was subjected to all-out
attacks, and revisionism in China exposed. Moreover a powerful People's
War was initiated in Peru. Soon after that, in 1993, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism
was adopted by RIM as the new, third and higher stage of the science
of revolution. But owing to the continuing grip of right-opportunism/revisionism
in the communist parties in south-east Asia, including the CPM,
the ideological and political break-through that the masses need
to forge a genuine revolutionary vanguard there, even today, remains
at the very top of the agenda of everyone dreaming of a world free
of oppression and exploitation.
Conclusion
The importance
of the international dimension - the previous existence of a real
socialist society in China as a beacon for the world proletariat
- cannot be overemphasised. For the communist movement in south-east
Asia this is even surer given the proximity of China and the close
support and internationalism extended to the communist parties in
the south-east Asian countries materially, as well as morally and
politically. Clarity of thought concerning the dynamics of the changes
that took place in China during the GPCR period and afterwards is
vital to an understanding of what socialism is and what it is not.
It is likewise essential to understand not only the concept of class
struggle in society as a whole but also its reflection within the
communist party in the form of line struggle. Failure to grasp this
means failure to grasp the essence of Marxism.
The communist
parties in south-east Asia in general and Malaysia in particular
are among the parties that failed to grasp this vital point. Their
inability to put attention to the key questions of political and
ideological line and the two-line struggle at the heart of their
parties' life inevitably left them powerless to fend off the heavy
hand of the past, the dead weight of millennia of class society,
and left them easy prey to various forms of bourgeois ideology.
Thus it was that the blow that finished off the revolutionary armed
struggle in Malaya came not on the field of battle against the hated
enemy, but from the hands of the Party leadership itself. This is
sobering testimony to the power of political and ideological line,
a lesson for future generations of revolutionaries that Chen Ping
teaches us by what our Chinese comrades used to call "negative example".
Footnotes
1. The country
of Malaya was situated in south-east Asia between Thailand and Indonesia
and was made up of 11 states, including the peninsula of Malaya
and Singapore. Since 1963, the former British territories in Borneo,
Sabah and Sarawak have been merged with Malaya to form the Federation
of Malaysia. This was an arrangement made by the British colonialists
to forestall the Borneo territories from falling into the hands
of the then radical anti-colonialist, nationalist Republic of Indonesia.
The overall imperialist domination of these territories was thus
maintained. The right of national self-determination for the people
of Sabah and Sarawak was denied. The left wing in general, and the
Communist Party of Malaya in particular, never accepted the imperialist
concept of Malaysia.
2. Malaysia
is populated by a number of different nationalities/ ethnic groups:
Malays, Chinese, Indians, a variety of aboriginal tribes (broadly
known as Orang Asali), Thais, Sri Lankans and many other nationalities
from various parts of Asia.
3. Most of
the Indians were previously dispossessed small peasants brought
over to Malaya by the British from the southern Indian state of
Tamil Nadu as indentured labourers. These workers form the bulk
of the labour force in the British-owned plantations in Malaya.
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