The Malayan Emergency

One of the earliest Cold War conflicts was a 12-year guerrilla war commonly known as the Malayan Emergency and fought from 1948 in the jungles of what is now Malaysia. This communist insurgency was fuelled not only by ideology but also by the desire for Malayan independence from British colonial rule. There have been a number of books and documentaries devoted to the subject but relatively few in English capture the experiences of the Chinese community in Malaya that was at the centre of the Emergency. Rajan Datar is joined by three guests, all with family links to the Emergency: Sim Chi Yin, a photographer and artist from Singapore whose book She Never Rode that Trishaw Again tells the story of her grandmother widowed during the war in Malaya; Show Ying Xin, a postdoctoral fellow at the at the Australian National University’s Malaysia Institute in Canberra; and Rachel Leow, Associate Professor in Modern East Asian History at the University of Cambridge and author of Taming Babel: Language in the Making of Malaysia. [Photo: Malayan police officers keeping watch from the Pengkalan police station in 1950. Credit: Haywood Magee/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images]