Chin Peng

Chin Peng led the Malayan Communist Party through the twelve-year Emergency and spent the last forty years of his life refused permission to go home. Born Ong Boon Hua in Perak to a Chinese shopkeeping family, he joined the party as a teenager after the Japanese invasion of China and organised resistance during the occupation of Malaya, working closely enough with British Force 136 that he was appointed OBE and marched in the London victory parade in 1946. The award was later revoked. When the party's strikes were suppressed and it was banned in 1948, the same men who had been armed and trained by Britain went back into the jungle with the same weapons, and he became secretary-general at twenty-three. The insurgency was beaten by the Briggs resettlement plan, by Templer's combination of force and political concession, and finally by independence in 1957, which removed the anti-colonial argument from him entirely. He walked out of the Baling talks in 1955 rather than surrender, held out on the Thai border until a peace accord in 1989, and then applied repeatedly to return to Malaysia. Every application was refused, the courts holding that he could not prove his citizenship. He wrote a memoir, gave interviews without apologising, and died in Bangkok in 2013; the Malaysian government refused to admit his ashes. His ashes were eventually brought home quietly in 2019 and scattered. He is the rare insurgent leader who lost, survived, and lived long enough to be interviewed at length about it by the people who had beaten him.

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