Who do you fight when you are invaded on multiple fronts?

Although Japanese invasion was definitely horrible, it did not impact every racial group equally. This would be critical in how anti-colonial movements, both national/petite bourgeois, proletariat and peasant groups in the country navigated tactical decisions when confronting both British colonialism and Japanese imperialism. It perhaps was one of the first major disagreements between those in the Malaysian Left.

To quote an article I mentioned prior,

Armed by these racial views, the Japanese augmented early Malay nationalist sentiments which had already existed at the time, for example, among the anti-colonial pan-Islamist Kaum Muda, with strong connections with the Middle East, and the left-wing group Kesatuan Melayu Muda, which was inspired by nationalist movements in Indonesia.88 To achieve its pro-Malay policy, the Japanese established leadership training schools known as the Koa Kunrenjo in the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Malacca…

Malay attitudes towards the British definitely took a downward turn, fuelled by their inflamed nationalist sentiments, no longer mystified by the invincibility of the British empire.95 However, they had to strategically navigate their relations with the British as ‘winner’ of the war, buttressed by the British ideological offensive against Japanese propaganda and compounded by Japanese reticence in remembering the war in Southeast Asia.96 All these worked in tandem to produce the Japanese Occupation as ‘an unfortunate anomaly of history’, an interregnum, rather than ‘a watershed in the history of the country’.97

Brief description on the Japanese occupation

This perceived closeness of the anti-colonial Malay Left to Japanese imperialists, soured relations with the Chinese communist movement in Malaya. Although history is never fully black and white, with collaborators of multiple kinds in any racial group, this underlying tension and race-class stratification lead to Malay parties holding a more ambivalent attitude to Japanese invasion, which was anaemic to the Chinese, who were facing their own ethnic cleansing through the Sook Ching massacres. Another infamous example was the “Death Railway” built in Thailand and Burma where hundreds of thousands died. Many Malays and Indians especially were captured and worked to lay across tracks across Mainland Southeast Asia. The MPAJA, or Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army, consisting mainly of ethnic Chinese, allied and obtain weapons from the British to repel Japanese occupation. It was only after WWII did they turn to guerrilla warfare against British colonisation. The prevalence of the Communist movement in fighting Japanese occupation meant that post-independence narratives by the ruling elite often had to sweep and downplay Japanese atrocities.

Although the occupation was brief, it inflamed the class struggles that ultimately led to independence from British colonial rule, ending a century of enclosure and 500 years of direct European control.

Nonetheless, Japanese imperial influence did not disappear. Malay nationalists adopted and adapted ideas from Japanese imperialism vis-à-vis British colonialism in forwarding localised visions of Malay nationalism and development.98 One of the most unambiguous manifestations of this can be found in the working papers prepared for the first BEC in 1965, an influential state-connected platform for mobilising Bumiputera causes and resources. In line with Abdul Razak’s aspiration,99 BEC 1965 was organised on the back of increasing Malay discontent with their economic conditions, particularly among the Malay petite bourgeoisie.100

Who are our friends? Who are our enemies?

Most of Malaya's export oriented rubber and tin industry was brought through indetured labourers and former peasants from India and China. The royal institution and malay reservations were enacted to 'secure' the native peasantry's existence against capitalist industry. For the Malay peasantry, Chinese capitalists were their biggest threat, for the Malay middle classes it was British colonialists. For the Chinese, whether anglo-aligned petty bourgeois or labour nationalist, fighting Japan was about defending China from imperialist threat abroad. After Japanese occupation, this contradiction between labourers and the peasantry was not adequately addressed - Chinese and Indian labourers had direct material interests in toppling British Capital but what about the peasants? To put it simply, progressive sections of the proletariat failed to organize the predominantly Malay peasantry, and their exploitation under non-British comprador classes. Their exploitation was not directly at the hands of the British bourgeoisie in the plantations and mines, and so being anti-British was not of an immediate material interest.

It should also be noted that which language you were educated in would also ultimately determine your eventual class trajectories and positions. English-educated classes would obviously lean British, but the spread of literacy would eventually also spread anti-colonial, socialist and (British) labour unionist ideas among some of them. Chinese and Tamil educated groups would take inspiration from their own background anti-colonial fights back in India and China.

Of course it is best to not over-emphasise this apparent incommensurability of material interests between different classes, and fall into liberal cynicism (and to some extent, historical nihilism). Certainly, the formation of AMCJA-PUTERA later on was a unity between various anti-colonial groups of different racial and class backgrounds. Although predominantly Chinese (about 90%), the MCP, or Communist Party of Malaya, had notable Malay-dominant army divisions (however this only really came about later during the Emergency), and one of the most notable Malay communists in the party being the chairman, Abdullah CD. The party also had networks with the “aboriginal” Orang Asli, especially after the British forced resettlements of 300,000 Chinese people, thereby cutting out the MCP’s main support base and supply lines, consisting about 5-10% of the Malayan population at that time.