“Do you support Israel’s right to exist?” Most people think this is a yes-or-no moral test. It’s not. It’s a rhetorical weapon. In this video, I explain why that question makes no sense. I tear it apart and show you exactly how to spot the trap and why refusing to play the game is the only real answer.

by BHIM BHURTEL

Back issues of the Harvard Business Review show how the Americans got it wrong

When management pundits in the Harvard Business Review first asked whether China could innovate, most saw a nation condemned to mere imitation of the West. From “China Is Not About to Out-Innovate the US” (2010) to “Why China Can’t Innovate” (2014), Western commentators framed innovation as a cultural or institutional product – something that could thrive only in free market economies, strong intellectual property regimes, liberal democracies, and political pluralism.

Two decades later, China’s ascent in electric vehicles, drones, 5G, high-storage batteries and artificial intelligence makes those assumptions look poorly postulated.

The irony is deep: The country that many thought was too state-controlled and authoritarian to foster innovation has become the world’s fastest innovator – not because it imitated Silicon Valley, but because it changed the way innovation is done.

The West’s critics of Chinese innovations were holding erroneous opinions.

The state as architect of, not a constraint on, innovations

Western management theories view the government as a market regulator, while Chinese practice views it as an ecosystem builder and an innovation enabler. The 2010 Harvard article claimed that government involvement always stifles creativity. But China’s most dynamic industries such as clean energy, electric vehicles and telecom infrastructure grew not despite state coordination but because of it.

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the State Council’s National Development and Reform Commission and local innovation zones are all mission-driven state institutions that don’t care about making a profit every quarter in companies’ financial statements. They want their country to be able to make all of its own technology.

This difference is very important. In the United States, innovation is rewarded only when it meets the needs of capital markets, not the product market. In China, it is supported when it fits with the country’s development strategy. When the Chinese government supports batteries, AI chips, or green technology, it does more than give money. It also buys products, sets standards and ensures that people have the right skills. So innovation is built into the environment and the infrastructure.

Critics (see HBR’s 2016 “How China’s Government Helps — and Hinders — Innovation”) recognized this duality but failed to see the asymmetry: The “help” is much stronger than the “hindrance.” Bureaucracy may slow experimentation at the edges, but scale, coordination, and patience have enabled entire industries to leapfrog several generations of technology.

China had plans to gain a competitive edge. This article drew on Ronald Reagan’s main idea from a January 20, 1981, speech: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” However, in China, the government is seen as the solution.

Manufacturing as innovation’s core, not its afterthought

For decades, Americans have equated innovation with invention – new patents, breakthrough science, disruptive ideas. China equates it with industry execution. Even as HBR’s 2010 cohort of writers lamented that China lacked “original breakthroughs,” Chinese firms were transforming production into an innovation engine.

Manufacturing is not just copying; it is an original lab. Every production line is a learning system that continually improves design tolerances, energy efficiency, logistics, supply chain management and cost efficiency. In this setting, new tools, processes, and business models work together. This is how BYD improved its blade battery, DJI improved drone stabilization, and CATL developed new modular EV power systems – all through cycles of scaled iteration that Silicon Valley could barely prototype.

America’s lack of interest in manufacturing has secluded design from delivery. American companies are great at coming up with new ideas, but they struggle to turn those ideas into final consumable products. China’s ongoing control over the “means of making” creates a rich information feedback loop for companies, with engineers, suppliers, and production managers working together and trying new things all the time. That’s how the speed of innovation builds on itself.

The HBR essays that used Nobel Prizes or R&D ratios to measure innovation could never see this process dimension. Learning by doing and learning by making things are two types of industrial learning that don’t show up on balance sheets but are very important in technological races.

Asia Times for more

by NADA ELIA & NOURA ERAKAT

In December 2023, former State Department official, Josh Paul told CNN anchor, Christiane Amanpour that during his tenure in the foreign service, he learned of the rape of a 13-year old boy by Israeli officers while in captivity. In response to U.S. inquiries, the Israeli Government designated the Defense for Children International, the Palestinian organization that documented the abuse, a terrorist organization.

Since then, multiple Palestinian testimonies have emerged, enough to fill the pages of reports by the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR), the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization. Among the most harrowing incidents was a leaked video of five Israeli officers gang raping a Palestinian detainee in Sde Teiman prison. An Israeli court not only acquitted the officers, but Israeli society celebrated them as heroes and protested their trial in infamous “right-to-rape” rallies. Still, when American journalist Nicholas Kristof published his opinion essay bemoaning impunity for the systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians in Israeli captivity in The New York Times, he insisted that there was “no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes.” (The Israeli government threatened to sue the paper of record for blood libel nonetheless.)

While Kristof, the UN, and human rights organizations are right to scrutinize the lack of concern and accountability for the sexual abuse of Palestinians, they have rarely asked how sexualized violence has functioned within Israel’s wider system of conquest, occupation and domination.

On June 30, 2026, the Palestinian Feminist Collective released a report that helps rectify that elision with meticulous research and painstaking documentation.  A Predatory State: Israeli Systemic Sexualized and Gendered Violence against Palestinians lays out a decades-long pattern of Israeli sexual aggression against Palestinian children, women, and men.  Harrowing as the 200-page report is, it is necessary reading for anyone concerned with human rights and gender justice. The report’s historic sweep, from the early days of the Zionist militia attacks on terrorized Palestinians, to the present day sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli prisons, should lay to rest any attempt to rationalize the current horrors as a response to the alleged rapes by Hamas militants of Israeli citizens or worse, an issue of a few rogue soldiers. Instead, the PFC report makes clear that such violence advances the genocide of the Palestinian people.

The report revisits a 1949 case, revealed in Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s own diary, in which he describes how a platoon of Israeli soldiers kidnapped a young Bedouin girl, “in her mid-teens.” When their commanding officer gave them the choice between using her as kitchen staff or a sex slave, the Israeli officers opted for the latter. They cut her hair and washed it with kerosene, then gang raped her so violently that on the next morning the officer in charge, Second Lieutenant Moshe, “saw fit to remove her from the world.”

Gendered violence is an inherent tool of settler colonialism and is not unique to Israel. Here in the United States, another settler colonial state, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement has highlighted the impunity surrounding the sexual assault of indigenous women on reservations where overlapping US and native criminal jurisdictions have made indigenous women particularly vulnerable to sexual assault. That it remains a significantly under-resourced and unaddressed crisis is not an accident.

Similarly, Zionist ideology, as a nation-making enterprise, necessitates the dispossession of Palestinian land and, ultimately, Palestinian elimination through juridical negation — denying their right to self determination, forced removal, containment, and/or destruction.  Sexual violence is central to that effort as it both advances ethnic cleansing ambitions and shatters the social cohesion of those Palestinians who remain.

Israeli historian Benny Morris, who bemoans the fact that the 1948 Nakba did not go far enough in ethnically cleansing Palestine, noted many reported instances of rape dating to the founding of the Zionist state. He observed that “because neither the victims nor the rapists liked to report these events, we have to assume that the dozen cases of rape that were reported, which I found, are not the whole story. They are just the tip of the iceberg.” The sexual violence, like other forms of violence enacted throughout and since the Nakba, aimed  to terrorize Palestinians and compel them to leave their towns and villages in search of safety.  Official records show that the highest-ranking Israeli officials were fully aware of these abuses. The PFC report traces this history from before the establishment of Israel, into the present and intensified genocide in Gaza, to illustrate how Israel has always relied on sexual violence to advance its colonial plans. In it, we learn about the rape of civilians during the 1948 Nakba, the sexual torture of innocent prisoners in administrative detention during and in the aftermath of the 1967 War, and the rape of grassroots organizers during the Intifada, all the way to 2023–that is, before the October 7, 2023. The report also provides an analysis of the unfounded mass rape accusations against Hamas militants to demonstrate how such narratives work to further racialize Palestinian society as uncivilized and unworthy of life.

Mondoweiss for more

by EDWARD CHEN

Researchers are racing to regrow the thymus, an ephemeral immune organ, in the hope that it will slow ageing.

In 1996, cryobiologist Gregory Fahy walked into his physician’s office and talked his way into a month’s supply of growth hormone. His hope, bolstered by a single study in rats¹, was that the injections would help him to regrow his thymus — a peculiar immune organ that atrophies and practically disappears as people age. Regenerating it, Fahy thought, would help him to live a longer, healthier life.

The improvement was obvious, at least according to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, Fahy says. His functional thymic mass nearly doubled². Whether it made him feel any younger, however, was less clear. “I was only 46 at the time, and more or less in peak health,” he says, although subsequent attempts to regrow the tissue left him feeling “energized and invincible”.

What started as an unregulated self-experiment has developed into a series of small clinical trials run by a biopharmaceutical company called Intervene Immune in Torrance, California, at which Fahy is chief scientific officer.

The company is not alone. An explosion of thymus research has taken place over the past three years, stimulated by reports in the literature that the health of the organ, once thought dispensable, is a probable indicator of a person’s overall health. Excitement intensified when a pair of studies published this year reported that dwindling thymic health correlates with an increased risk of death^3,4.

Investors are responding. In January, a biotechnology company in Basel, Switzerland, called TECregen raised 10 million Swiss francs (US$12.4 million) to develop therapies to regenerate the thymus, which might help to slow ageing and prevent cancer, according to the company’s website. It has not disclosed a drug candidate. Last October, Zag Bio, a thymus-focused biotech firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, launched with $80 million in funding. Venture-capital and pharmaceutical companies have been reaching out to Fahy and other scientists and starting their own research programmes. “The interest now in this field is enormous,” says Marcel van den Brink, chief physician and president of City of Hope, a cancer hospital and research centre in Duarte, California, who has studied the thymus since 1996. There was a “huge perception that I was wasting my time”, he says. But now, “people are contacting us” and taking the field seriously. (van den Brink is a scientific co-founder of a biotech company called Thymofox in Cambridge, Massachusetts.)

Forgotten organ

For decades, people thought that the thymus was vestigial. It has been “forgotten” and “disrespected”, says Georg Holländer, an immunologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who is a co-founder of TECregen. In the 1920s, some researchers thought that the organ was involved in producing eggshells in birds but had limited roles in mammals. Decades later, Nobel-prizewinning biologist Peter Medawar referred to the thymus as “an evolutionary accident of no very great significance”.

Nature for more

DEMOCRACY NOW

(The above interview is from September 2010.)

While President Obama is reporting looking into tapping a former corporate executive to become his next top economic adviser, many economists question the path the United States is on. We speak to the acclaimed Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef. He won the Right Livelihood Award in 1983, two years after the publication of his book Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics.

AMY GOODMAN: While President Obama is reporting looking into tapping a former corporate executive to become his next top economic adviser, many economists question the path the United States is on. Last week, during our trip to Bonn, Germany, I had a chance to speak with the acclaimed Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef. He won the Right Livelihood Award in 1983, two years after the publication of his book Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics. I began by asking him to explain what barefoot economics is.

MANFRED MAX-NEEF: Well, it’s a metaphor, but a metaphor that originated in a concrete experience. I worked for about ten years of my life in areas of extreme poverty in the Sierras, in the jungle, in urban areas in different parts of Latin America. And at the beginning of that period, I was one day in an Indian village in the Sierra in Peru. It was an ugly day. It had been raining all the time. And I was standing in the slum. And across me, another guy also standing in the mud — not in the slum, in the mud. And, well, we looked at each other, and this was a short guy, thin, hungry, jobless, five kids, a wife and a grandmother. And I was the fine economist from Berkeley, teaching in Berkeley, having taught in Berkeley and so on. And we were looking at each other, and then suddenly I realized that I had nothing coherent to say to that man in those circumstances, that my whole language as an economist, you know, was absolutely useless. Should I tell him that he should be happy because the GDP had grown five percent or something? Everything was absurd.

So I discovered that I had no language in that environment and that we had to invent a new language. And that’s the origin of the metaphor of barefoot economics, which concretely means that is the economics that an economist who dares to step into the mud must practice. The point is, you know, that economists study and analyze poverty in their nice offices, have all the statistics, make all the models, and are convinced that they know everything that you can know about poverty. But they don’t understand poverty. And that’s the big problem. And that’s why poverty is still there. And that changed my life as an economist completely. I invented a language that is coherent with those situations and conditions.

AMY GOODMAN: And what is that language? How do you apply economics or have those situations explain economics changing?

Democracy Now for more

by ALBERT CAMUS

Introduction

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined. But the Penal Code makes the convenient distinction of premeditation. We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose—even for transforming murderers into judges.

Heathcliff, in Wuthering Heights, would kill everybody on earth in order to possess Cathy, but it would never occur to him to say that murder is reasonable or theoretically defensible. He would commit it, and there his convictions end. This implies the power of love, and also strength of character.

Since intense love is rare, murder remains an exception and preserves its aspect of infraction. But as soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.

This is not the place for indignation. The purpose of this essay is once again to face the reality of the present, which is logical crime, and to examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified; it is an attempt to understand the times in which we live. One might think that a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, or kills seventy million human beings should be condemned out of hand.

But its culpability must still be understood. In more ingenuous times, when the tyrant razed cities for his own greater glory, when the slave chained to the conqueror’s chariot was dragged through the rejoicing streets, when enemies were thrown to the wild beasts in front of the assembled people, the mind did not reel before such unabashed crimes, and judgment remained unclouded. But slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman, in one sense cripple judgment.

On the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence through a curious transposition peculiar to our times it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself. The ambition of this essay is to accept and examine this strange challenge.

Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in action, can avoid committing murder. We can act only in terms of our own time, among the people who surround us. We shall know nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. In that every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether or why we have the right to kill.

The important thing, therefore, is not, as yet, to go to the root of things, but, the world being what it is, to know how to live in it. In the age of negation, it was of some avail to examine one’s position concerning suicide. In the age of ideologies, we must examine our position in relation to murder. If murder has rational foundations, then our period and we ourselves are rationally consequent.

If it has no rational foundations, then we are insane and there is no alternative but to find some justification or to avert our faces. It is incumbent upon us, at all events, to give a definite answer to the question implicit in the blood and strife of this century. For we are being put to the rack. Thirty years ago, before reaching a decision to kill, people denied many things, to the point of denying themselves by suicide.

God is deceitful; the whole world (myself included) is deceitful; therefore I choose to die: suicide was the problem then. Ideology today is concerned only with the denial of other human beings, who alone bear the responsibility of deceit. It is then that we kill.

Each day at dawn, assassins in judges’ obes slip into some cell: murder is the problem today.

The two arguments are inextricably bound together. Or rather they bind us, and so firmly that we can no longer choose our own problems. They choose us, one after another, and we have no alternative but to accept their choice. This essay proposes, in the face of murder and rebellion, to pursue a train of thought which began with suicide and the idea of the absurd.

But, for the moment, this train of thought yields only one concept: that of the absurd. And the concept of the absurd leads only to a contradiction as far as the problem of murder is concerned. Awareness of the absurd, when we first claim to deduce a rule of behavior from it, makes murder seem a matter of indifference, to say the least, and hence possible.

If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance. There is no pro or con: the murderer is neither right nor wrong. We are free to stoke the crematory fires or to devote ourselves to the care of lepers. Evil and virtue are mere chance or caprice.

We shall then decide not to act at all, which amounts to at least accepting the murder of others, with perhaps certain mild reservations about the imperfection of the human race. Again we may decide to substitute tragic dilettantism for action, and in this case human lives become counters in a game. Finally, we may propose to embark on some course of action which is not entirely gratuitous. In the latter case, in that we have no higher values to guide our behavior, our aim will be immediate efficacy.

Since nothing is either true or false, good or bad, our guiding principle will be to demonstrate that we are the most efficient—in other words, the strongest. Then the world will no longer be divided into the just and the unjust, but into masters and slaves. Thus, whichever way we turn, in our abyss of negation and nihilism, murder has its privileged position.

The Philosopher for more

Clara Mattei is an economist who wants us to rethink the idea that capitalism is simply the natural order of things.

She is an author and professor of economics whose work explores how economic ideas become tools of power, shaping policy while masking the political decisions beneath.

Her new book, Escape from Capitalism, argues that many of the problems that we see as inevitable – poverty, unemployment, inflation – are built into the system and shored up by models and theories designed to convince us that there is no alternative.

On this episode of Ways to Change the World, Krishnan Guru-Murthy speaks to Mattei about whether there is an alternative to capitalism.

by ARUNDHATI ROY

Can all the people be fooled all the time? Can a country with a population of a billion-and-a-half be dragged around like a corpse forever? It cannot. The Cockroaches are out and about.

For the first time in years, it feels wonderful to be Indian. Just when hope seemed lost, they came. Young roaches riding in on the rain. The progeny of the unholy union between a judge and a joke.

We all know the story, but here it is, for the record. In response to an arrogant, contemptuous comment by the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, calling some unemployed young Indians cockroaches, Abhijeet Dipke, a student living in Boston, posted a comment on Instagram: “What if all cockroaches come together?” Millions responded. And thus was born the Cockroach Janta Party. Dipke became the Pied Piper of cockroaches. Its first demand was the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister who sits smugly atop a corrupt, rotten ministry under which public exam papers are regularly leaked. An estimated 152 since 2014, according to opposition parties. These leaks have devastated the lives of millions of young people who spent years preparing for these exams, some of whose parents have had to sell their land or homes to support their children’s studies and pay the fee for the right to appear for these exams. A novel form of legal extortion. After the recent leak of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) paper, 12 distressed, wrecked students died by suicide.

As Cockroach anger grew into an online tsunami, Dipke returned from Boston on June 6 and went straight from the airport to Delhi’s famous protest grounds at Jantar Mantar. Sonam Wangchuk, the well-known activist and education reformer from Ladakh joined him and declared an indefinite hunger strike. Six university students, Neha Bora, Manish Kumar, Aameen Amitosh, Danish Ali, Hrishikesh and Deepak, members of the All India Students Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Liberation), declared they would fast too, and took up position on an adjacent stage. Protests began in other cities. As the condition of those on fast grew critical, the young roaches who had swamped the internet began to show up at Jantar Mantar for real. The Cockroach Janata Party announced that on July 20, the day parliament was to open for its monsoon session, they would march on Parliament. Two days before the planned march, Sonam Wangchuk was snatched off the stage by the police and held in detention, first in a government hospital, and later at his wife’s insistence, in a private hospital. He still remains on fast. On the morning of July 20, the day of the march, the AISA students ended their fast.

The cockroaches took the capital city by storm. They came by train, by bus, by air, by metro, their numbers increasing by the hour. Hours before the first rays of sun lightened Delhi’s monsoon skies, they began to pour into Jantar Mantar in the tens of thousands. By sunrise it was clear that a generation of desperate and furious young people who have seen their future snuffed out before their eyes, was going to reclaim what their parents and grandparents’ generations had conceded: our dignity as a people and as a country. Our rights as citizens of a democracy. The protesters exorcised the corrosive fear that has become second nature to us all with their sheer courage and grace. And humour. By the end of the day it was clear that the protest had become about something far bigger than what the protesters or their leaders were demanding. Dharmendra Pradhan is small change now. The stakes are far bigger. The rot in the whole system of governance, from top to bottom is clearly visible and has begun to stink like a decomposing corpse. Even the tiniest of the cockroaches, some no more than seven or eight years old were able to clearly articulate that.

Despite the quick and almost clandestine appointment of a new police chief days before the march, and despite worried whispers about the terrifying proficiency of our terrifying Union home minister, both the police and the home ministry completely miscalculated the scale of the tsunami that engulfed Delhi on July 20. They tried everything. They blocked buses and roads and metro stations. It didn’t help. They tried to jam the internet. But the young roaches – creatures of the internet – somehow subverted that effort with a deluge of memes and videos that made you laugh and cry at once. In Delhi, of all the places in the world, young women who were part of the protest said that they felt safe in the crowd. – although some complained about being groped by the police. We saw Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, people belonging to every caste and class coming together, helping each other, protecting each other as they faced down the police. Instead of lecturing us, or giving us grand speeches, they showed us, demonstrated for us, the possible India, the beautiful India of our dreams. 

To deal with this danger, the police welded together their yellow metal barricades, and brought their tried and tested props: trucks full of stones, and pre-damaged vehicles in the hope that they could make it look as though the young people had turned violent and the police were acting in self-defence. They brought in an army of plainclothes goons armed with batons and clubs. To prepare for action, the Rapid Action Force (RAF) removed their name-tags from their uniforms. The faithful mainstream TV channels were lined up, primed to report the lies. (Some jumped the gun and began to report things that hadn’t happened yet. News in India tends to be about the future, not the present.) Nothing worked. The police and RAF swung their lathis wildly, broke children’s heads and fractured limbs. They fired tear gas. But the young kept marching. Straight towards parliament. Straight to where they said they would go. As they approached, security forces took position, their AK47s aimed at the unarmed students. Still, the Cockroaches marched. And as they marched, they stripped away any remnants of the velvet glove that masks the government’s iron fist and exposed the current regime for what it is and always has been. A fascist iron fist. A confederacy of brutes with no capacity to understand the history and the diversity of the country which it governs. People who only know how to hate, but have no idea how to love. Or think.

The Wire for more

by JEYAKUMAR DEVARAJ

To understand the current situation in Malaysia we need a brief overview of the history and political and economic development of the country.

To understand the current situation in Malaysia we need a brief overview of the history and political and economic development of the country. The Portuguese first came to Southeast Asia in the early 16th century. They, and the Dutch who came about 130 years later, had mercantile interests – they wanted to control the trade routes so that they could acquire the commodities that were in demand in the European market. Hence, they wanted control of the shipping routes and main ports, but were not interested in controlling the hinterland.

The industrial revolution in Europe created a hunger for raw materials such as tin, coffee, sugar, and rubber. The colonial powers needed control over the land in South East Asia to be able to mine, and to open plantations. They also needed cheap labour for the production of these commodities. The local population was not too inclined to slave in difficult conditions for low wagesⁱ. Also, the British thought it best to not disrupt the indigenous Malay population, but instead relied on labour from India and China to develop the colonial economy. This led to a massive influx of Indians and Chinese to the Malayan peninsula starting in the mid-19th century.

Malaya, being colonised by the most ‘virile’ industrial power of that time, experienced the fastest development of mines, plantations, roads, railways, and ports, compared to Indonesia, Indochina, and the Philippines. This resulted in massive demographic changes – at Independence in 1957, the immigrant population of Chinese and Indians was actually slightly more than half the total population of Malaya. The class character of Malayan society had changed dramatically in the colonial period. Prior to 1800, the vast majority of the population were peasants and fishermen engaged in a subsistence economy. The colonial economy generated a large working class in the plantations, tin mines and the railways, and this in turn sparked off a network of supporting economic activities – market gardening, import of food and other basic necessities, retail trade, local production of some consumer products, transport, etc.ⁱⁱ

In the meantime, the native Malay population was shielded from the colonial economy, and their lifestyle and economic activities did not change much. The British were outwardly ‘respectful’ of the Sultans of the various States and provided handsomely for them, as this helped sustain the myth that the British were benevolent ‘advisors’ to the native rulers. Land was plentiful in Malaya, so the British had no cause to deprive the Malay peasants of their land. But they enacted a law that forbade the Malay farmers from converting their rice fields to plantations of rubber or other commodities for export.ⁱⁱⁱ Rice was the staple grain for the Malays as well as the immigrant Chinese and Indians. The British needed a sufficient supply of inexpensive rice for immigrant labour.

The only strata within the indigenous community which resented British rule were the Malay chieftains and lesser royalties whose sources of income – levies on the produce of the peasants, contributions for the use of rivers, etc. – were compromised when the British took over the administration of land in Malaya. There were, therefore, a series of revolts by these chieftains in the late 19th century, but they were not able to get the support of the peasants (whose way of life had not been much affected by the colonial economy) or the Sultans who were well looked after by the British.^iv

The Malayan Communist Party and the Independence Struggle

The Malayan Communist Party (MCP) was founded in 1930 in Singapore. The MCP retreated into the jungle in early 1942 and resisted the Japanese occupation of Malaya as the Malayan People Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA). The MPAJA was largely ethnic Chinese as the Japanese had a pronounced anti-Chinese bias. The MCP was recognised by the British post-World War II, with its leader Chin Peng receiving the Order of the British Empire in London. The MCP opened offices in several towns in post-World War II Malaya and continued organising the population.

Independence was in the air in Asia, spurred by vibrant independence movements in China, India and in Indonesia by the end of World War II. Though many of the Malay and Indian nationalists had been on the opposite side during the Japanese occupation, the MCP managed to set up a broad-based coalition called the All Malayan Council of Joint Action (AMCJA).^v It comprised the trade union movement, the MPAJA, the Malayan Democratic Union (a party set up by urban English educated Malayans), the Malayan Indian Congress, some Chinese business interests, and others. The AMCJA formed a pact with PUTERA, a coalition of Malay nationalists comprising the Parti Kebangsaan Melayu Malaya, Angkatan Pemuda Insaf (API), and the Angkatan Wanita Sedar (AWAS).

The AMCJA-PUTERA coalition had a series of discussions that resulted in the ‘Peoples Constitution’ detailing how the nation would be governed post-Independence. However, the British rebuffed the efforts of this coalition to initiate negotiations for independence. The AMCJA-PUTERA coalition called for a Hartal that was carried out on 20 October 1947. All activity in Malaya was stopped for a day – a nationwide strike where even businesses did not open.

The British struck back. API was banned in July 1947 and several of its leaders including the charismatic Ahmad Boestamam was detained and imprisoned. The British then passed legislation to control the militant trade union movement. Unions had to limit themselves to specific sectors of the economy. The then-existing General Labour Unions had to reorganise themselves into smaller sector-based unions and register with the Registrar of Trade Union (RTU). The RTU however refused to recognise many of the re-organised unions. When they attempted to continue to organise the workers, these unions were deemed illegal criminal organisations and their leaders detained. Strikes were met with brutal repression with instances of workers being killed by the authorities.

On 17 June 1948, a unit of the MCP assassinated three British planters in Sg Siput Perak. The British declared the Emergency, arrested thousands of activists and outlawed the MCP, which took to the jungles. In the initial period, MCP units were able to prevail, over-running small rural police stations and even briefly taking over the administration of a rural town, Gua Musang. The British High Commissioner of Malaya, Sir Henry Gurney of Malaya was assassinated on 6 October 1951.

The British countered with the Brigg’s Plan in 1950 to deny food supplies to the communist forces. All the Chinese farmers scattered in the peri-urban regions were forced to move into 540 security camps, with barbed wire fencing all around, and a single-entry point guarded by the military or police. The farmers were allowed to tend to their crops during the day but were under curfew from dusk to dawn. Plantation workers were not permitted to buy rice. The management of estates gave each family a daily ration of cooked rice depending on the size of the family. The indigenous community, the Orang Asli, too was similarly confined in security camps.

The communist insurgency, deprived of food, was not able to sustain larger units. A decision was taken in 1952 to retreat to the Malayan-Thai border.^vi The British also had a propaganda blitz where they painted the MCP as Chinese dominated and injurious to the long-term welfare of the Malay population.

Meanwhile the British set up Legislative Councils with representatives from the elites of Malayan society – the Malay aristocracy and non-Malay business leaders. They recognised United Malay National Organisation (UMNO) that was set up by Malay aristocrats and elites in colonial civil service. A national election was called in 1955 in which the Alliance Party, a coalition led by UMNO, won 51 out of the 52 seats contested. It had campaigned on the pledges of Amnesty for the MCP and Independence within two years. The leader of UMNO, Tunku Abdul Rahman was designated as the Chief Minister of Malaya.

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