The communist guerillas in Malaya who found a welcome in Hong Kong
Malaya's communist guerillas, invaluable allies during the Pacific war, found refuge in the melting pot of Hong Kong, writes Jason Wordie
Malayan Communist Party leader Chin Peng's death last month in Bangkok at the age of 88 highlights enduring - yet often overlooked - Hong Kong links to the Pacific war in Southeast Asia, the subsequent Malayan Emergency and its lengthy political aftermath.
Allied resistance to the Japanese during their occupations of Malaya and Hong Kong would have been almost impossible without the co-operation and support of communist guerillas. At war's end, their leaders were publicly thanked and rewarded; Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army leader Chin (also known as Ong Boon Hua) was awarded a military division OBE and, in Hong Kong, East River Column leader Major Raymond Wong (a pre-war Queen's College student) was awarded a military division MBE.
Both political groups were then expected to disappear quietly into peacetime civilian life. However, having contributed to the Allied victory, the communists, naturally enough, wanted a leading role in the post-war power structure. In Malaya, this struggle erupted in 1948 into a bitter period of guerilla warfare, euphemistically known as the Malayan Emergency.
Political loyalties among prominent Malayan-Chinese families were sharply divided - often for pragmatic reasons. While one sibling kept the family businesses running and ensured the current political order remained contented another went into the jungle with the guerillas. By doing both, the family unit would survive, whichever side eventually won.
Mainland support for its communist cousins dwindled after the Emergency was declared over, in 1960 - three years after Malayan independence. With the social dislocations and internal strife caused by the catastrophic failure of the Great Leap Forward to deal with, China had no appetite for the fomenting of socialist revolution elsewhere. Strategic requirements achievable by peaceful means - the Tanzania-Zambia railway project, which linked the Indian Ocean port of Dar-es-Salaam with mineral and resource-rich central Africa, to cite one obvious example - were considered far more important by China than aiding a substantially defeated armed conflict in Malaya.
Chin decamped to China and remained there, for the most part, for the next three decades.
