Fifty years ago, the name Chin Peng was feared almost as much Osama bin Laden is today, writes Philip Bowring.

True he did not have the wall-poster appeal of Osama or of Che Guevara but in his heyday in the late 40s, as the leader of the Communist insurgency in Malaya and Singapore at a time when both Chinese and Soviet Communism were in the ascendancy, he was a greater threat to the West and its Asian allies than Ho Chi Minh. His very anonymity and unremarkable looks added to the sinister connotation of this “evil genius”.

Ho Chi Minh won his war and is long dead. Chin Peng lost his but still lives, quietly in southern Thailand. He was 80 in October and has given in his own views in My Side of the Story, a book compiled from interviews by journalists, Ian Ward and Norma Miraflor.

Chin Peng, (real name Ong Boon Hua) had an astonishing rise to revolutionary leadership. He was brave and a natural leader. As a teenager he was the liaison between the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) and the British special operations forces fighting the Japanese occupation. He won two medals and the Order of the British Empire. Two years later, in 1948, after becoming at the age of 23 the CPM’s secretary-general, he launched the insurgency in Malaya. It lasted for a decade, sputtered again in the 1970s, and was not finally declared over until a peace deal with Malaysia and Thailand in 1989.

Chin Peng acknowledges that “the victors edit history” so his loser’s version of history does give a new perspective to those years of struggle, when the anti-Japanese hero had turned “child killer” with a huge price on his head, alive or dead. It reveals a man without rancour or regret. He is anxious to put some records straight.

He notes the success of British propaganda both in exaggerating the cruelties of the “Communist Terrorists” as they were called and covering up their own, such as the 1948 Batang Kali massacre, a British My Lai. The press was as easily fed as it is today. Followers of Singapore politics will also note his rebuttal of “countless allegations by Lee Kuan Yew and the western press” that the CPM controlled the Barisan Sosialis, the main opposition party in Singapore whose leaders were locked up in 1963. As late as 1988, Singapore used Communist “threats” to jail oppositionists, including Catholic social activists.

Chin Peng does not regret his struggle but he does acknowledge many leadership failings. They included underestimating the capacity of the British to fight back, and their skill in adapting Japanese tactics to cut the insurgents off from supplies and sympathizers. Gradually the insurgents were pushed back into the jungle, had to reduce the size of their groupings and keep on the move. Meanwhile most people, even poor Chinese, wanted peace as rubber prices boomed thanks to the Korean War, and the British promises of independence kept the Malays and the Chinese businessmen mostly on their side.

By implication, he acknowledges the dead hand of Communist solidarity. By 1959 the CPM knew it had lost the insurgency war. It scattered its few remaining forces and Chin Peng left for Hanoi and then Beijing. But China and Vietnam both urged re-engagement for their own purposes. The time seemed ripe. The Vietnam War was going Hanoi’s way, Malaysia was rent by racial strife. But the second phase of action inflicted, as he admits, minimal damage on an independent Malaysia, and caused the CPM to fragment into a movement ridden by plots, treason trials and executions. Chin Peng was in Beijing, safe but, he insists, uninvolved in the fratricidal struggles taking place in the camps in Malaysia and Thailand.

For all his candour on some aspects of history, Chin Peng largely avoids one main reason why his revolution failed: it was a Chinese movement in a Malay world. Of the 1,118 CPM followers left in 1989, only 77 were Malays. His revolution, like Mao’s was a Chinese nationalist as well as a Communist one. Son of migrants from China, he was first fired by Chinese opposition to the Japanese occupation. The CPM insurgency certainly, as he claims, hastened Malaysian independence. But the CPM was always uncomfortable with the Malay majority, not to mention its aristocratic leadership. The CPM opposed Britain’s plan for a Malayan Union partly on grounds that it was “too restrictive” to Chinese. The Malays opposed it for precisely for the opposite reason.

Despite Chin Peng’s claims that the CPM was “the only indigenous political movement capable of offering a challenge to the imperialists”, its own indigenous credentials were always in doubt. The book reinforces those doubts.

His attitudes are this likely to be of interest to those in Southeast Asia who fear that the combination of China national strength and ethnic presence are a threat, different but no less than that posed by the mix of ideology and ethnic identity embodied in Chin Peng. Equally though, one could sense that he and his ageing former followers were always more at home in that strip of tropical land which links the Gulf of Siam to the Straits of Singapore than they ever could be in Beijing.
As for the analogy with Osama bin Laden, who knows where that former hero of the fight against atheistic Soviet communism will be should he ever reach his 80th birthday.

Chin Peng: My Side of the Story
By Chin Peng (as told To Ian Ward & Norma Miraflor)
Published: 2003, Singapore, 1st Edition
PB; 527 Pp
ISBN: 9810486936
Price: US$20