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Patriot Games: How British Nation-Building Colonialism Solved Malaya’s "Chinese Problem"

Sun, March 19, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 2nd Floor, City Hall

Abstract

“Patriot Games” analyzes how Britain and the pro-British indigenous elites of Malaya collaborated to defeat Malaya’s mostly Chinese communist party, which the colonial powers expected would serve as China’s fifth column in Southeast Asia. Following the success of China’s communist revolution, British officials grew increasingly worried by what they called their “Chinese problem” in Malaya—almost half of the colony’s population was ethnic Chinese, most of them enamored of “New China” under the communists and sympathetic to the anti-British Malayan Communist Party (MCP) that had mounted a popular resistance to Japan’s occupying forces during World War II. From the late 1940s through the early 1950s, however, Britain and its local collaborators (including prominent ethnic Chinese Malayans) drew hundreds of thousands of local Chinese into a multi-racial coalition against their fellow Chinese in the MCP, redirected the transnational affiliations of local Chinese away from China toward a pro-British Malayan nation, and firmly aligned postcolonial Malaya with the western powers. This paper explores how Britain and its collaborators—men they cultivated as the pro-West “patriots” of Malaya—engaged in nation-building colonialism, how they solved Malaya’s “Chinese problem” with a blend of anticommunism, nationalism and antipathy to China.

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