The Mighty Wave

By He Jin

The translators, Tan Jing Quee, Loh Miaw Gong and Hong Lysa have helped revive this almost lost Singapore novel - Ju Lang, was its original title - to add it to the country's literary heritage. The novel's central feature is the anti-colonial movement against the British in the Singapore of the early 1950s. It follows a group of middle class students who started campaigning in 1954 for exemption from national service imposed by their British rulers and ends with the triumph of their party in the 1959 elections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Function 8
• Release date: Apr 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9789811898297

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The Mighty Wave

The Mighty Wave

The Strategic Information and Research Development Centre (SIRD) is an independent publishing house founded in January 2000 in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The SIRD list focuses on Malaysian and Southeast Asian Studies, Economics, Gender Studies, the Social Sciences, Politics and International Relations. Our books address the scholarly community, students, the NGO and development communities, policymakers, activists and the wider public.

SIRD also distributes titles (via its sister organisation, GB Gerakbudaya Enterprise Sdn Bhd) published by scholarly and institutional presses, NGOs and other independent publishers. We also organise seminars, forums and group discussions. All this, we believe, is conducive to the development and consolidation of the notions of civil liberty and democracy.

The Mighty Wave

Copyright © 2011 He Jin

Published in 2011 by

Strategic Information and Research Development Centre

No 11, Lorong 11/4E, 46200 Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.

Email: [e-mail]

Website: www.gerakbudaya.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

He, Jin

The Mighty Wave / by He Jin; translated by Tan Jing Quee, Loh Miaw Gong (Loh Miaw Ping), Hong Lysa.

1. Chinese fiction–Translations into English.

I. Tan, Jing Quee. II. Loh, Miaw Gong. III. Hong Lysa IV. Title 895.13

ISBN 978-967-5832-17-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-981-1898-29-7 (eBook)

Cover design and layout by Rose Tan & Janice Cheong

Printed by Vinlin Press Sdn Bhd

2, Jalan Meranti Permai 1,

Meranti Permai Industrial Park,

Batu 15, Jalan Puchong,

47100 Puchong, Selangor, Malaysia.

Contents

Translator’s Preface

Introduction: Ju Lang and The Mighty Wave of History

Reflections upon Reading Ju Lang - Loh Miaw Gong (Loh Miaw Ping)

A Word from the Editors

General Preface

Foreword

Author’s Preface

Timeline of Events

Introduction: On that Day

Chapter 1: Becoming the Contact Person

Chapter 2: A Difference of Opinion

Chapter 3: Gunshots

Chapter 4: Anti-Yellow Culture Movement

Chapter 5: Ebb and Flow

Chapter 6: Between Advancing and Retreating

Chapter 7: Songs Ringing from the Hill

Chapter 8: Going Underground

Chapter 9: Moving Towards the Workers and Farmers (1)

Chapter 10: Moving Towards the Workers and Farmers (2)

Chapter 11: Friendship and Romance (1)

Chapter 12: Friendship and Romance (2)

Chapter 13: Overcast Skies in September

Chapter 14: Meeting of Old Friends

Chapter 15: Loyalty Under Fire

Chapter 16: May Buddha Bless and Protect Us

Chapter 17: Taking the Issue Right to the Top

Chapter 18: Unhappy Parting

Chapter 19: Parting

Chapter 20: Condemning the Traitor

Epilogue

Afterword

Editors’ Afterword

May 13 Photographs

Translator’s Preface

It would not be amiss to call this effort at rendering Ju Lang, a novel written in the Chinese language into English as bizarre. I would expect even friends to call it ‘idiosyncratic’. Purists and professional translators would certainly be justified in shaking their heads in disbelief at how we proceeded with the work.

In the first place the selection of this novel for translation can and has been questioned. It is an unlikely choice given that it has not sold well at all; readers even those in Singapore below the age of sixty five perhaps would be quite mystified by it, as they would have little or no idea at all about the context in which the events and characters are set, in particular the references to what are today obscure writers such as Alexander Fadeyev (1901-56) Julius Fucik (1903-1943) and Nicolai Ostrovsky (1904-36). Yet theirs were among the most popular works read in translation by the Chinese middle school students of the 1950s. That was a Singapore that most of its citizens of today would not recognise, or even imagine was possible, so thoroughly has this aspect of its history been wiped out.

Equally unlikely is the three individuals who undertook the task of presenting this novel in English. Not one of us can claim to be effectively bilingual. We are very aware not least of our linguistic limitations and the clumsiness of our operation. Loh Miaw Ping would read the text out line by line in Chinese. Tan Jing Quee, who also writes poetry and short stories, would instantly render it into English, and I would key that in, occasionally chipping in with suggestions of alternative words, or asking for clarification on the meanings and contexts.

My team-mates were students in the 1950s. Loh Miaw Ping, as her essay tells us, was at the Jalan Besar Stadium when the police confronted the students at Clemenceau Avenue. Tan Jing Quee is slightly younger, but by the time he was politically active in the Socialist Club of the University of Malaya in the early 1960s, he worked closely with the students of Nanyang University, and has continued to maintain his friendship with his Chinese-educated friends, in particular fellow former political detainees.

I am about one generation younger, and got to know and work with them only within the last four years at most. As a historian I have an academic interest in exploring the 1950s, and my teammates began quite by sheer luck as my ‘resource persons’. When Tan Jing Quee knew that I was researching on the period, he recalled that there was a novel in Chinese about the May 13 1954 event. His friend Loh Miaw Ping gave him the title, and he obtained a copy for me from Kuala Lumpur.

I was thrilled when I read Ju Lang. To me the book is the most thorough riposte there is to the caricature of the students that has dominated our image of them. Tan Jing Quee immediately came up with the idea of translating the novel; Loh Miaw Ping did not hesitate for a moment to join in. From March 2009 to January 2010, we met almost every Saturday at Tan Jing Quee’s place; about half way through, we added a weekday session, which commenced when Loh Miaw Ping’s kindergarten-going grandson got on his school bus, and ending when he returned home. We met the author He Jin twice, the first time in Bangkok in March 2009 to seek his permission to translate the novel, then at Hadyai a year later to inform him that the first draft was completed, and to seek clarification on certain points which we were unsure of.

At one level, the translation work was an exercise in nostalgia for Loh Miaw Ping. She would tell us about her own experiences as a student, her memories of the North Bridge road area which He Jin writes of, and where she happened to grow up in. During the camp-in at Chinese High School, she slept on the top of the grand piano, being of slight built. She would sing parts of the songs mentioned in Ju Lang when we got to them as well as others that she could remember. When we came to the part in the novel that mentioned the ‘May 13’ porridge, Tan Jing Quee and I requested that she cook us the porridge and ikan bilis meal for lunch. She said she would, but instead served us porridge with dried scallops, being the good host that she was. I can’t say that we complained. When we invited her to write her thoughts on the novel, she completed the task with an immediacy that cannot be simply attributed to efficiency.

But it was not just nostalgia. We were in the midst of doing the translation when Men in White: The Untold story of Singapore’s ruling political party (2009) was published. For weeks, we would discuss the excerpts of the book with great animation as they appeared in the Straits Times before getting down to work. That book gave us even more reason to translate Ju Lang.

At the low points in the novel, Tan Jing Quee would get a little restless, and to keep himself going, would tease Loh Miaw Ping, exaggerating the differences between the Chinese and English educated students, in particular their courtship rituals. I was introduced to two worlds and their overlaps in the most concrete way possible.

Tan Jing Quee, with his fine sense for identifying significant book projects proposed that we work on a companion volume to The Mighty Wave–a collection of essays on the Chinese middle school political activism of the 1950s. The May 13 Generation: The Chinese Middle Schools Student Movement and Singapore Politics in the 1950s (SIRD, 2011) is the result. He decided from the start that there would be an English and a Chinese edition of the book. On a few occasions Tan Jing Quee has mentioned that had his life not taken the unexpected path that it did in 1963 when he was in his early 20s he would have become an academic, most likely a historian.

Rose Tan greatly facilitated our endeavour. It is certainly true that it would not have been possible without her. For one thing, she would remind us to stop talking and start working when we got carried away.

William Yap Hon Ngian gamely and expertly gave valuable tips before the novel was about to go to press on how the translation could be improved. Of course, the fact that there is still room for improvement is no reflection on him, but on the amateur translators.

Goh Hui Chi is proud to be the first person to read the English translation when she went through the manuscript in the final stages of the editorial work. In her early twenties, she also noted that she is probably the youngest person so far to have read the novel, though we hope she will lose that claim very quickly with the publication of this work. As a younger generation reader, she was able to tell us where explanations of certain phrases or events were necessary for those not familiar with Singapore of the 1950s.

When we were working at Loh Miaw Ping’s place, then 3-year old Shen Yuze would wonder why nai nai’s friends would be quickly ushered into the computer room, when they were showing interest in what he was telling them about his ‘ultra-man’ toy. When lao da Shen Yuxuan came home from kindergarten, he politely replied to our questions about how his day went. They had no idea about what their grandmother was up to, and why it was that these days, she had ‘work’ to do.

It is our hope that one day, they and those of their generation will find out, and will understand.

Hong Lysa

Introduction: Ju Lang and The Mighty Wave of History

Going Against the Tide

Ju Lang is arguably the most significant novel that has been written by a Singaporean about Singapore in the 1950s. It is probably the first full-length piece of creative writing by a local writer who has lived through the period, and to date it hardly has rivals. More importantly, the author offers a specific perspective about those times–that of a Chinese middle school student, and a member of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Thus, it is an invaluable historical document that offers insights into aspects of history that hitherto has been simply absent and inaccessible. Singapore history from the 1950s on has on the whole been dominated by one question: Where were the communists in the events being discussed. If there were individuals who were card-carrying members of the Malayan Communist Party involved, it would automatically be assumed that everything would have been orchestrated by the Party, which had total control over the minds especially of the ‘mentally porous, dangerously impressionable’ middle school students.¹

He Jin is thus one of those Singaporeans who cannot be mentioned in the country’s history except as a stereotypical communist—ruthless, ideologically straight-jacketed, and working for the destruction of a democratic society. And it is the nature of the stereotype that he and others like him are assumed not to have a personal history, thoughts and feelings and the ability to make decisions, to grow and develop, for better or for worse. The effacement of their individuality has been vital to keeping the Singapore Story intact. This story tells of the 1950s as the battle between the communists and the non-communists in the most important struggle that determined the fate of Singapore’s history, the non-communists in this instance being the PAP faction which remained in the Lee Kuan Yew camp, and who have the ones telling this story.

He Jin tells of a different struggle—that between the British colonial power and the anti-colonialists, which included the MCP, and the PAP, led by Lee Kuan Yew and by Lim Chin Siong the undisputed leader of the left-wing trade unions, who gave the political party its mass base, which comprised largely of the Chinese-speaking population. In Ju Lang, the author narrates his understanding of the political situation of the time as a student leader, an emerging literary figure and an MCP member in a thinly-disguised fictional form. Ju Lang was published in 2004, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the May 13 incident of 1954, an event which is largely ignored in the mainstream accounts of Singapore history, or if mentioned at all dismissed and condemned as a ‘communist plot’.

The introduction to the author given in Ju Lang tells us that his actual name is Lin Jinquan. He was born in Singapore in 1935 and was a student of Chinese High School and Chung Cheng High School (1951-1954). He started writing for publication in 1951. His short stories include ‘Song of Youth’, ‘Fellow student Shen Yulan’, ‘The Little Thatch Hut’, ‘Green Green Grass’, and ‘Sunshine and Mist’. He has worked as a teacher, a broadcast presenter, a secretary, and has been a farmer as well. When he was a student in the mid-1950s, he was forced underground and participated in the covert struggle. In the early 1980s he was sent to join the guerilla war in the jungles of the Thai-Malaysian border. This war ended in December 1989. He currently he lives in Hadyai.

When He Jin wrote Ju Lang, he was sixty nine years old, in retirement in south Thailand, where party members lived following the Hadyai Peace Accord signed by the Malayan Communist Party, and the governments of Thailand and Malaysia in December 1989 which officially brought an end to the guerilla war.

The context and the characters

The May 13 1954 event which Ju Lang commemorates marked the first mass and open confrontation between the Chinese school students and the colonial power. The British, or red-haired devils as the Chinese speakers of the day in the colony called them, were the colonial rulers, but their prestige had fallen badly with their surrender to the Japanese when the latter invaded Malaya and Singapore in 1942. The deaths, suffering and deprivation were inflicted most severely on the Chinese population in Singapore and Malaya, which saw the Japanese invasion as an extension of its war with China which broke out in 1937. The proscribed MCP took arms in partnership with the British against the Japanese, and was rewarded with recognition as a legal political party after the war. However, in 1948, the British once again banned the party, and imposed the Emergency, which lasted till 1960. This entailed the suspension of civil rights, which included detention without trial for those suspected of being members of the MCP. Being caught with copies of the Freedom News, the underground paper of the Party which was published between 1948-1957 meant arrest and imprisonment, and if a person was not born in Singapore or a British subject by application, the likelihood of deportation or banishment to the land of birth was great. Xu Min and Zheng Yi in the novel were deported to China, though the former was born in Indonesia.

Provision shop owner Huang Ah Ji was secretly receiving and distributing Freedom News. He could not turn down his friend Li Xin’s call for help to do this. Li had fought against the Japanese, a background he shared with most of the other older communists in the novel, who were regarded as heroic and inspirational by the Chinese in Malaya and Singapore. In their eyes, the British forces which reoccupied Malaya and Singapore had lost their legitimacy to rule, and with the wave of independence movements in the colonies, particularly in Indonesia, which had fought a war against their Dutch colonial ruler to attain its independence (1945-49), as well as the proclamation of Indian independence from British rule by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1947 the politicized middle school students and other anti-colonial groupings harboured similar aspirations for their society.

The Chinese Communist Party’s success in its revolution in 1949 which saw the establishment of the People’s Republic of China brought immense pride to the Chinese overseas, for it was regarded as the end of the national humiliation which China suffered in the hands of the western powers and Japan. The Chinese middle school students looked up to the university students in China who since the May Fourth movement, when they sparked off a series of anti-imperialist political, cultural and intellectual demonstrations in Beijing, had awakened the consciousness of the youths as historical actors. With the success of the revolution in China, the middle school students in Singapore and Malaya became more conscious of the tasks ahead of them in the colonial system which they inhabited as the British became increasingly suspicious of them. While those who went to English schools could proceed to the University of Malaya, the middle school students could no longer make their way to study in universities in China as a matter of course, and they faced unemployment on graduating from school.

Indeed, the British started to try to assert greater control over the Chinese schools from 1949 on. Education policies became a major concern, and their strategy was to increase the number of English schools which were given substantial government subsidies while at the same time offering increased financial assistance to the community-funded Chinese schools in return for more control over their management, and increased hours of classes taught in the English language. Chinese community leaders and educationists were unanimous in rejecting the increased grants, seeing the offer as the first steps in the extermination of the Chinese language and schools by the British. They were not far off the mark. The Supplementary to the Ten Year Plan for education which came into effect in 1950 clearly indicated that the right kind of school for Singapore was deemed to be the English school, where Chinese, Malay and Tamil were to be taught as second languages. In the same year, the Registration of Schools (Amendment) Ordinance was passed which gave government the power to de-register a school, which then had to show cause why it should be allowed to operate. A couple of months following that, the Chinese High and Nanyang Girls’ High School were raided by the police, and closed for two and a half months when the police claimed to have found copies of Freedom News and other communist literature on the premises. The notion that English was a colonial language that was used to prolong the life of the rulers, and that correspondingly Chinese education was being attacked were part of the consciousness of the middle school students, but also of the Chinese community leaders and literati in the British colony.

The Stories of He Jin

The anti-yellow culture movement was related to the political, economic, social and cultural revolutions that the students felt was needed to bring about a new society. A series of rape-murders occurred in 1953, which the police could not solve. The turning point occurred when a female student was the victim. She was from an English school. The middle school students went beyond regarding the crime as a law and order problem which pointed to an inadequate police force. They launched a movement against all forms of unwholesome, lewd entertainment, including films, stage dances and pornographic writings which were popular, and which made substantial profits for its publishers and distributors. These were regarded as decadent, the result of an unbridled capitalist system underwritten by a colonial government which used them to distract the people from the miserable conditions of their existence.

The middle school students organized talks against yellow culture in their respective schools, and burnt ‘yellow’ books. In their stead, a new literature was advocated, and student publications sprang up during this period. They included Huang Di (Wasteland), Geng Yun (Cultivator), and Ren Jian (The World), which were subsequently proscribed. He Jin can recall the enthusiasm for writing during the period, where there was no payment for contributions, nor for putting out these publications. He described the phenomenon as ‘tender shoots sprouting despite the crushing weight of the boulder’. These publications promoted writings which aimed to reveal the actual conditions of life of the labourers, farmers and the unemployed. However they also offered a way out of such conditions, usually through united action of the oppressed through trade unions or farmers’ associations, as well as the leadership of middle school graduates working as teachers in the rural areas. He Jin’s short stories written in the 1950s are almost all in this vein.

The other aspect of the socially conscious short stories which he wrote was about student life. Here, the message was also the unity of students based on mutual help and friendship; his ‘Song of Youth’ and ‘Fellow student Shen Yulan’ were written in this vein. These two stories were included in A preliminary study of the history of post war Malayan Chinese literature (1987) by Fang Xiu, the respected compiler and foremost scholar of local Chinese literature. However, even a specialist like Fang was not aware that ‘Fellow student Shen Yulan’, (6 October 1954 under the pen-name Wei Jia) was authored by the same He Jin who wrote ‘Song of Youth’. (September 1953). This became known only when A Selection of He Jin’s Short Stories was published in Singapore in 1999.

The cultural and educational concerns of the students were fused in the charity concert that was put up in March 1954 by the joint effort of the graduating students from all the middle schools to raise funds for the Nanyang University. This effort, which gained the praise of the community, was also a platform to showcase the new cultural performances which the students were pioneering. In the novel, Huang Ah Ji and his wife attended the concert at Happy World, enjoyed the performances, and were in awe of the students for being so capable as to run such a large scale production. The charity concert also gave the students the opportunity to work closely with their counterparts from other schools, and allowed leaders among them to emerge. This proved to be particularly important for the May 13 incident about five months later, when the students had to handle a much larger and controversial logistical exercise.

The pivotal event in Ju Lang is the May 13 1954 civic action taken by the middle school students to demonstrate their resistance to having to do national service even though they were still schooling. This was mandated by the National Service Ordinance, 1954 which required that all males between the ages of 18 and 20 register for service, with provisions made for appeals for exemption. The registration period was between 5 April to 12 May 1954. On May 13, about one thousand middle school students, both male and female assembled along the pavement of Clemenceau Avenue near Government House to await the outcome of the meeting between their representatives and the acting governor. However, before the student leaders got to meet the governor, they and their fellow students were set upon by the riot police, and their assembly forcibly broken up. 48 students were arrested. The authorities immediately and predictably claimed that the whole event was orchestrated by the communists, which some newspapers of the day immediately noted was without substantiation. The students had been careful to limit their case to the exemption from national service for Chinese middle school students. It was in Chinese schools that students of call-up age were mostly to be found. There were overage students in Chinese schools on account of the Japanese Occupation, even though those who went to English schools also had their schooling disrupted. However, the school fees for English secondary schools were heavily subsidized by the government, unlike in Chinese schools where students who did not come from well-off families would take on part-time jobs, or defer their schooling till they had enough savings from working. Also, the middle school course of studies took six years to complete, which was longer than in English-medium schools by two years. The students argued that though the training was only on weekends and school holidays, their study load was particularly heavy as they had to study English as an additional principal subject. Their tack was therefore to point out that they were not against national service as such, but that those in middle schools should be exempted.

The British and their supporters however presented national service as a necessary step in the tutelage towards self-government, for an independent state had to have the capacity to defend itself. They accused the middle school students of being draft dodgers who had no loyalty to Malaya, while reaping the benefits of British rule.

The careful limiting of their petition for exemption and public statements on the grounds that they were still schooling won public support. However the characters in Ju Lang clearly gave far stronger political and ideological reasons against conscription. They refused to be cannon fodder, fighting for the British against their own people in the guerilla war taking place in the peninsula. Also they did not believe the British assurance that they would not be called upon the serve in the front lines and beyond Singapore, for the legislation allowed for this if war was declared. The French had been defeated at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu only about five days prior to the May 13 event. In brief, their stand was that the colonial state had no moral authority to institute national service, which only a democratically elected government had.

‘Bloody May 13’ is how the story of the event has been told by both sides. It is title of Dennis Bloodworth’s chapter on the events of the day, citing the pro-colonial Straits Times report titled ‘Schoolboys Battle Police’ which claimed that one policeman had been hit in the head by a flying stone and hospitalized with a broken head, while six others had been stabbed. A few days later some newspapers published articles citing hospital reports which said that the police at most suffered minor injuries. The students lined up on the pavement were unarmed, and were not even carrying banners or posters.

On the other hand, the students talked about ‘the blood stained incident’ which they should never forget. This stirring call by the student who had bled from a head injury is woven into Ju Lang, and still remembered today by those who were present. The police violence inflicted on the students won the latter much public sympathy. The sensitivity of the authorities to the press coverage was patent. They charged six newspapers for contempt of court when they were alleged to have suggested that the students were not guilty of obstructing police officers ‘in the execution of their lawful duty at Tank and Penang roads, by refusing to disperse when ordered to do so’ when the matter was sub judice. More pertinently, these papers had questioned if the orders to send in the riot police against the students was the most appropriate course of action to take.²

The Chinese Chamber of Commerce acted as the intermediary between student representatives and the colonial government. However, the authorities unilaterally announced on 22 May, the final day for registration as granted by the extension of the deadline after the May 13 event, that the middle schools would break for vacation with immediate effect. The school holidays were brought forward by a fortnight. This was to prevent the students from gathering in the schools. The latter saw this as bad faith, and attempted to hold a mass gathering and camp-in at Chung Cheng High, but this was broken up by the police, using anxious parents as a front for them to charge into the school. In the novel, this incident caused Tianzhu to be heavily criticised for his failure in leadership. On 2 June the students managed to re-group and occupy the Chinese High campus for 22 days during which time the more than a thousand students managed to sustain a regular and orderly student life.

The negotiations brokered by the Chamber representatives who were also school management committee members stalled with the British insistence on the students registering and then applying for deferment which would be guaranteed for those in the senior middle two and three graduating classes, while the students insisted on deferment for all who were still schooling. The students held a two-day hunger strike, which resulted in the Chamber conveying a verbal agreement by the British to the students’ terms. Both sides claimed victory. Ju Lang gives a participant’s account of the Chinese High camp-in, including how the student leaders handled the negotiations with the Chamber leaders, received parents and well-wishers, dealt with infiltrators, organized a meeting with parents at the same time that the Chamber had planned one, and which drew a better turnout than the latter, and worked out the likely consequences if the hunger strike failed to make the British treat the students’ demands seriously.

The Chinese middle school students have maintained that May 13 was a just cause, and the way the students handled the matter was reasonable, appropriate and effective. The students were willing to compromise, accepting British offer of postponement for all students rather than exemption which they had wanted, and dispersed with the matter being resolved. In a short 2008 article, He Jin strenuously refuted the suggestion that the students’ handling of the national service question was ‘too left’ and ‘adventurist’, though he agreed that this was more debatable for the subsequent events, when the British used other underhand methods to settle scores with the students. To him the actions on the part of the students from 12 March to 28 June were all appropriate ones though governments as well as historians would present these events very differently from how the masses saw them.³

Indeed, ‘the schoolchildren had been incredibly well-organised’, but when such a statement came from Bloodworth the insinuation was that there was a ‘hidden hand’ behind the students who were directing the events. Based ostensibly on communist documents in the possession of the Internal Security Department to which he had privileged access, Bloodworth states that according to the Party’s plans, ‘The students were to be coerced into petitioning the Governor for exemption. When the governor remained silent, they were to threaten to march to the Central Police Station to be jailed en masse, and would be pushed into a disciplined camp-in in the Chinese High School, where they would be persuaded to set up miniature soviets’⁴ Indeed it would be difficult to deny the orchestration by the Party if one were to disregard the fact that the sources were likely to be post-facto Party propaganda material, and accept it an authoritative source on the matter. The way that history in Singapore has been framed by the state, the events of May 13 can be regarded as justified only if it was genuinely led by students. The Tiger and the Trojan Horse insists on what appears to be good authority that it was not.

Freedom News speaks out

The book’s monopoly on Freedom News ended in 2008, when the complete set of the publication was made available.⁵ The contents of the Party paper do not necessarily sustain what Bloodworth claimed it said, and even throws up questions about the accuracy of was some of the information that the intelligence service was gathering.

Moving that the Emergency Regulations be continued for another three months in his speech of 2 November 1954 to the Legislative Council, the Governor mentioned that the police had seized large quantities of MCP documents which revealed the careful plans and preparations it made to stir up students against the Government, in particular ‘explicit and detailed instructions on the methods to be employed in opposing national service.’ The April 15 issue of the Freedom News had indeed called conscription the ‘extremely barbarous and cruel’ criminal act of the British Imperialists, noting that even though the law had already been enforced, propaganda work had to be continued and even extended, while it recognized that ‘anti-conscription propaganda and incitement cannot at present be expected to yield any very outstanding results.’ Seven points were given as guidance on how to conduct the propaganda by this deadly illegal underground paper. They included exposing the ‘shameless lies’ such as the assurance that the government would not transfer people to foreign countries to fight in a war’, and raising the slogan ‘Rather go to jail than go and sacrifice ourselves’ which had sub-clauses to the effect that ‘by going to jail, we need not have to go and sacrifice our lives, and we need not have to undergo long-term hardship’, and ‘If we dare to resist and go to jail, the British Imperialists will not want us any more in future.’ These pointers may well be a sample of the ‘detailed and explicit instructions’ that the Governor was referring to.

In Ju Lang, Tianzhu indeed seriously contemplated pushing for the students to go to jail rather than register for national service, but Xu Min and others were adamant that it was better to make a strategic retreat. There were divisions among the students on this issue, and intense debates were held. Finally they decided to see if they could try to get into Chinese High, after learning that some students had ways of getting in surreptitiously. It was a strategic move, based on specific developments as events unfolded. Indeed, Zhengbo, the other key protagonist in the story, had been told by his superior in the cell group that the students should be prepared to go to jail rather than register, but the student leader preferred to work through the recognized representative body that they now had—the All Singapore Chinese Middle Schools Student Delegation to Seek Exemption from National Service and pursue a constitutional path as long as that was open to them. The student leaders were at the frontline, and worked out their strategies based on everyday contingencies.

In the final Freedom News issue which featured the anti-conscription event, a brilliant victory was declared, constituting ‘a glorious page in the history of the Malayan peoples’ liberation movement’. The article credited the achievement to ‘the steadfast and unified struggle of the students and the broad masses’, at the core of which was the unprecedented unity among the middle school students who ‘bravely marched forth with one heart’. The slogan ‘Unity is strength’ had become an effective slogan to goad the students into practical action. This was most evident in the ‘miniature kingdom’ that came into being in the Chinese High camp-in. The students led a collective life which was free and disciplined at the same time, a prototype of the future happy life of the Malayan people. The Straits Times had commented that the students formed their own ‘miniature soviet’, which the Freedom News editorial took as a compliment. The editorial also recognized the indispensible support for the students given by ‘labourers of all races, urban workers, peasant masses of the rural areas, majority of the middle-class national bourgeoisie.’ In particular, the Pan-Malayan Students’ Union and the University of Malaya Students Union censured the British for persecuting the students using arms. Ironically, this Freedom News editorial in detailing how the British had created an atmosphere of white terror to threaten the students pointed to the Straits Times’ suggestion that the students’ refusal to register was communist-inspired, and that the Chinese schools should bear full responsibility. The Freedom News writer apparently regarded the accusation that the communists were behind the anti-conscription moves as but part of British propaganda.⁶

This editorial did not put the underground or the party at the heart of events which were considered to be such an overwhelming success, and did not exalt the role of the MCP in it, or even communism as such. In fact it reads like the reflection of the events that Zhengbo and Tianzhu submitted to Li Xin. Finally made available to the public, Freedom News has turned out to be freer than expected of an underground communist party organ in this instance, and certainly more ambiguous in what it can tell us about May 13 and the communist party than what writings which make claims based on its authority in the expectation that their sources would remain as confidential material would have us believe.

Following the end of the Chinese High camp-in, Zhengbo and Tianzhu were forced to go underground, as they became persons of interest for the Special Branch. Li Xin berated them for not even informing him of such a major exercise as the anti-conscription movement. Had they done so, he would have directed that one of them take an open leadership role, while the other work covertly, so that at least one of them could continue working with the students. In a key section of the book, Zhengbo argued that May 13 and its aftermath were direct concerns of the students. The two of them were elected as leaders by fellow students, and acted as such. At the same time, he conceded that Li Xin’s criticism of the both of them taking open roles had its merits. Ju Lang has presented a complex picture of what it meant to be a middle school student and communist party member or a sympathizer. They were different from characters of their age group like Little Gong, Tianzhu’s good friend at primary school who preferred to join the Workers’ Protection Corp and take armed action rather than what came to him to be the mundane tasks of surreptitiously pasting party slogans and hanging the red flag for the public to see. Huoyan, who left school to work as a radio technician, was more proud of his technical skills rather than giving much thought to understanding the political situation. But even among the students, there were a range of characters, from Sun Hui, who distinguished himself as a student leader when the Lim Yew Hock government cracked down on the mass organisations in the September 18 1956 incident, in which union and student leaders were arrested, but was rather full of himself, and expected to be treated as a hero. He did not have the stamina for the life of hardship in the underground, working as a labourer like Zhengbo and Tianzhu did to earn their keep, but also learn from experience what the exploited classes were going through so that they could help them organize unions and night schools. Another student, the ambitious Wang Liqing passed herself off as a writer of progressive essays and stories, but was willing to see her younger sister being taken advantage of by a lecherous older man as he would give Liqing the funds to study at Nanyang University. It is hinted that she subsequently became an informer in the university. The key protagonists Zhengbo, Tianzhu, Huizhen and Mei Li had their share of making poor judgments, disagreements, jealousies, and despair, but their friendship survived because of their unity of purpose. They understood what they were doing, and the price they had to pay for the paths they had chosen.

Who’s who

In one sense, the most controversial aspect of Ju Lang is the portrayal of Li Xin. He Jin, a lifelong member of the Malayan Communist Party, has made a veteran of the anti-Japanese war and his cell leader the villain of the novel. He had to wait for the peace accord to be signed to do this. In his short stories which were written in the eighties he had written of less than outstanding leaders of units and battalions in the guerilla army fighting for its existence in the jungle, but these were kept under wraps till their publication in 1999 in Zheng rong sui yue (Age of glory). In these stories, what made up for their venality were the spirit of comradeship of the rank and file, deep friendships and appreciation of one another’s personal history. While remaining true to his ideological cause, He Jin has come out to say that as students, they were too innocent in believing that all those who participated in the revolution were good people. Nevertheless, in Ju Lang, the positive tone of the finale is possible only because a ‘good’ leader turns up to re-establish the moral order. The Li Xin character is based very closely on a real person, who after his capture as detailed in the novel, proceeded to obtain employment which principally involved interrogating and beating up those arrested on suspicion of being communists. Similarly, among those who are familiar with that period of history, it is not difficult to identify who the character of the ‘good’ leader is based on, and almost all of the key student leaders as well. The character of Zhenghai, Zhengbo’s brother, a University of Malaya Socialist Club member and a medical student is the easiest to identify of the characters in the book. He kept pressing his brother and his fellow students on the danger of being too ‘left’ and alienating the masses. His contribution and that of his university friends challenges the myth of the hard-line, chauvinist Chinese middle school students bent on taking an extreme position.

There is a strong element of trying to recall ‘the past exactly as it was’ in the novel. The students celebrating the killing of Henry Gurney (1898-1951), the British High Commissioner in Malaya, and the taking of a pledge in front of the photograph of Stalin in 1953 are