Malayan Emergency

The Malayan Emergency was declared in June 1948 after three European planters were shot at Sungai Siput in Perak. The British blamed the Malayan Communist Party, led by Chin Peng, and banned it. Its guerrilla army, the Malayan National Liberation Army, was drawn mostly from ethnic Chinese who had fought the Japanese during the occupation. The war lasted until 1960. It is called the Emergency rather than a war because, it is said, planters and mine owners would have lost their insurance cover if it had been called a war.¹³

The party had fought the Japanese with British support and then turned against British rule when London refused to grant quick independence. Postwar economic hardship, and the roughly half a million Chinese squatters on the jungle edge who supplied the rebels, fed the insurgency. The British response, called the Briggs Plan after 1950, moved around 500,000 people, mainly rural Chinese, into fenced New Villages, cutting off the guerrillas' food and recruits. General Gerald Templer, in charge from 1952, combined force with an offer of political reform and a promise of independence.¹²³

By the mid 1950s the guerrillas were mostly beaten, and the Emergency was declared over on 31 July 1960. Roughly ten thousand people are thought to have died, though estimates vary. The conflict helped shape the path to independence in 1957, with the British handing power to a conservative, multiracial coalition led by Tunku Abdul Rahman rather than the Communists. British methods in Malaya, including resettlement and winning local support, were later cited as a model for counterinsurgency, though historians argue over how much.¹⁴