The Emergency (1948-1960): Massive Urbanization and Demographic
Change
During the early years of the Emergency before independence was granted,
the British administration initially attempted to repatriate to China thousands
of ‘stateless’ Chinese squatters living in rural settlements at the fringes of
jungles and hills who were suspected of aiding the communist insurgents by
being the source of their food supplies and financial support. But the
repatriation succeeded in seeing only a few thousands of these squatters
being sent to China before the procedure was foiled by the communist
government in China which closed all Chinese ports to foreign ships due to
fear of an impending Western military attack. Only a few ships got through
before the ban, while others carrying repatriated Chinese had to stop at the
port of British-ruled Hong Kong but not allowed to proceed further to China. Eventually all those repatriated Chinese were brought back to Malaya. The
British authorities were forced to think seriously of alternative ways to
resolve this issue.
The remedy was the Briggs Plan, which saw half a million rural people
who were suspected of being communist sympathizers and helpers uprooted
and removed into temporary camps or ‘new villages’. The impact of this big
shift changed the demographic picture of Malaya and (later Malaysia) and led
to rapid urbanization and in the concentration of Chinese in towns.19 In preEmergency
Malaya many Chinese were transients and unable to acquire land
legally, ‘squatting,’ that is, illegal occupation of vacant land, was therefore a
common form of Chinese colonization. All unalienated land in the Malay
States was invested in the Malay Rulers and land titles in each state were
granted only on the authority of the Ruler-in-Council. Much of the land
could, therefore, be alienated only to Malays. The main causes of the sharp
increase in the rural squatter population appeared to have been: natural
increase, illegal immigration during and after the Japanese occupation (1941-
1945), movement of labourers from closed mines and run-down plantations,
and exodus of town-dwellers into the countryside to grow food.