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Singapore The Communist Threat, 1945-63
The CPM was legal in Singapore during the first
two-and-one-
half years of post-war British colonial rule. The
communistcontrolled Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army, formed
during the
Japanese occupation, had several hundred Chinese members,
including
the commander, Chin Peng. In 1945 and 1946, many poorly
educated
Chinese Singaporeans sympathized with the communists
because they
seemed to offer a program of labor reforms that would
benefit the
common man. Additionally, most of the better educated
Chinese
resented British policies that limited participation in
politics to
Straits-born British subjects who were literate in
English. A large
segment of the Chinese community also supported the
Chinese
Communist Party as it moved closer to gaining control in
China.
Chin Peng was elected secretary general of the CPM in
March 1947.
At that time, the communists had an estimated 300 members
in
Singapore who were committed to the party's goal of
destabilizing
the British regime by promoting civil unrest in the trade
unions.
In 1947 communist fronts were influential in organizing
over 300
strikes involving more than 70,000 workers. Economic
concessions by
the colonial government and business community reduced but
did not
destroy communist influence, and communist leaders
gradually became
more militant. They recruited former guerrillas of the
Malayan
People's Anti-Japanese Army and members of various secret
society
gangs to form the underground Workers' Protection Corps.
When the
communists were unsuccessful in penetrating targeted trade
unions,
small groups belonging to the Workers' Protection Corps
used
various methods of intimidation in an effort to have
moderate
leaders replaced by communists or communist sympathizers.
The party's chance to take over Singapore from the
British
through legal means ended in 1948 when the communist
leaders
decided to adopt a strategy of insurrection and terrorism
in Malaya
and Singapore, which led to the period known as the
Emergency (see Glossary).
The CPM was declared illegal and was subjected
to
countermeasures by the government; its membership in
Singapore
dropped precipitously, and all of the members of the
Singapore Town
Committee, which was the CPM's central committee for
Singapore,
were arrested in December 1950. The communist effort was
crippled
until the mid-1950s, when a new strategy of collaboration
with
legal political organizations was adopted by the
government. The
communist movement survived in Singapore largely in the
Chineselanguage middle schools, whose students were particularly
susceptible to propaganda because their employment and
political
opportunities were much more limited than those of
English-speaking
Chinese. After 1949 the success of the communists in China
also
attracted students to the party. The organizing force
behind
student activity was the Singapore Chinese Middle School
Students
Union. Because of the unpopularity of the 1954 National
Service
Ordinance, which required males between the ages of
eighteen and
twenty to register for conscription or face jail or a
fine, the
communists had little difficulty in organizing violent
student
demonstrations. No popular uprising in support of the
communists
ever materialized, however.
In 1956 when it had become clear that the British were
going to
leave Singapore, the communists moved to obtain control of
an
independent government by legal means while continuing to
foster
disorders. In October 1956, after more rioting by students
and
laborers, Singapore's police raided labor unions and
schools and
rounded up large numbers of communists and communist
supporters.
The concurrent effort by the communists to find a legal
route to
power focused on the party's alliance with the PAP.
Organizers of
the PAP had deliberately collaborated with the communists
in order
to broaden the PAP's organizational base among the Chinese
majority, and the communists saw in the leftist
orientation of the
PAP an ideologically acceptable basis for an alliance.
When the
communists attempted to seize control of the PAP Central
Executive
Committee in 1957, however, they were defeated by
supporters of Lee
Kuan Yew. Lee went on to lead the PAP to victory in the
1959
election. As prime minister, Lee gradually eliminated
communists
from influential positions within the party and government
and
later used provisions of the Internal Security Act to
prevent
alleged communists from participating in politics.
In February 1963, the Singapore and Malaysian police
forces
organized a joint operation that resulted in the arrest of
111
suspected communists in the two countries. This
large-scale police
action targeted suspected CPM members in Singapore and
successfully
destroyed the party's underground political organization
in
Singapore. In 1989 there were no reports of the CPM's
having
reestablished a base of operations in the country.
Data as of December 1989
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