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Notes on the Cold War in

Southeast Asia
Chua Beng-Huat
Version of record first published: 09 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: Chua Beng-Huat (2001): Notes on the Cold War in Southeast Asia,
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2:3, 481-485

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 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 2, Number 3, 2001
Notes on the Cold War in Southeast Asia
CHUA Beng-Huat
The heroic age of communism in Asia was
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probably the decade immediately after World
War II. Even before the war drew to a close,
the colonized peoples of Asia had begun their
struggle for decolonization, for a projected
future of citizenship, social equality and social
justice which was often rhetorically couched
in the language of communism/socialism.
The communist moral critique of capitalism,
brought in tandem with colonialism, was
therefore embedded in, and complicated by,
local mobilization for national political inde-
pendence. Communist parties, `legal’ or pro-
scribed by the colonial regimes, ® gured
prominently in many of the awash-in-blood
wars of national independence.
Almost every nation in Asia had experi-
enced communist insurgency either in open
warfare or in protracted civil war, with the
communists pushed into the tropical jungles
and/or urban underground. Even Singapore,
as it was then part of British Malaya, experi-
enced Ð albeit at a distance Ð the eight-year
`Emergency’ (1948 to 1956), in which the
British colonial government engaged `commu-
nist terrorists’ in a guerrilla war in Malayan
jungles and plantations. Killing of the `terror-
ists’ was a daily news item on the radio. The
`Emergency’ was further complicated by the
fact that the members of the Malayan Com-
munist Party (MCP) were overwhelmingly
ethnic Chinese, in a country where the indige-
nous populations were Malays and in a re-
gional context where the most powerful
communist regime was the then newly consti-
tuted People’s Republic of China (PRC), giv-
ing the suppression of communism an added
ethnic dimension.
ISSN 1464-9373 Print/ISSN 1469-8447 Online/01/030481± 05 Ó
DOI: 10.1080/ 14649370120111028
By 1947, the British colony of Burma was
independent. Indonesia had declared its inde-
pendence in 1945 and became independent
after successfully defeating the Dutch colonial
power after a bloody war in 1949. In 1950, the
Viet-Minh secured North Vietnam, having
militarily defeated the French colonial regime,
but then succumbed to international pressures
to accept partitioning of the country into
North and South Vietnams, no less from the
then newly established communist govern-
ment of the People’s Republic of China, which
had in 1949 driven the Kuomingtang to Tai-
wan. In the rest of geographic Southeast Asia,
legalized or insurgent communist parties con-
tinued their struggles either against continu-
ing colonialism or newly constituted national
governments, such as the Malayan Commu-
nist Party in British Malaya and Thai Commu-
nist Party in (never-colonized) Thailand.
To erect a barrier against the expansion of
communism, the US, with the cynical but
calculated support of the dwindling colonial
powers Ð Britain and France Ð created the
South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)
in 1955, drawing in Australia, New Zealand,
Thailand, Philippines and Pakistan (both be-
came independent in 1946 from Britain and
the US, respectively) as members; obviously,
each of the countries joined SEATO with its
own self-interest. Other invited countries, in-
cluding India, Ceylon, Indonesia and Burma,
declined to partake in what they saw as con-
tinuing dominance of Western interests in
Asian affairs.1 Born of this Treaty, the very
idea of `Southeast Asia’ as a political entity
was thus a Cold War invention.
2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
 482 Chua Beng-Huat
After decolonization
The immediate results of the struggles for
independence and subsequent governing
regimes might be broadly divided into two
groups: `communist’ Southeast Asia, which
included Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, all
part of what was `French Indochina’ and cap-
italist Southeast Asia, which included Indone-
sia, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines,
Thailand and the Sultanate of Brunei Ð the
original members of the Association of South-
east Asian Nations (ASEAN), formed in 1967
Ð where communist parties were proscribed,
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and subsequently defeated. Burma had main-
tained its neutrality with its own ideology of
`socialism’.
Throughout Southeast Asia, after political
independence, regardless of communist or
capitalist, nationalist struggles shifted to mo-
bilization for nation building, politically and
economically. Signi® cantly, politically almost
every country quickly lapsed into different
modes of authoritarianism. In communist
states, the regimes were, and continue to be,
constituted by the absolutist communist
party, backed up with a `people’s army’ ,
which having played a determining role in the
decolonization struggle consolidated its cen-
tral place in the state structure. In the capital-
ist regimes, power to govern fell into the
hands of either authoritarian politicians
backed by the military or to the military itself;
cases include, respectively, the Philippines
under Marcos, Burma and Thailand under a
string of military rulers and Indonesia under
Suharto. Yet another different mode of au-
thoritarianism manifested itself in Malaysia
and Singapore in the guise of a `democrati-
cally’ elected single-party dominant state; the
same political parties, United Malay National
Organization (UMNO) and People’s Action
Party (PAP), have respectively governed
Malaysia and Singapore since the political in-
dependence of these nations.
The economies of the two groups of na-
tions Ð capitalist and communist Ð under-
standably have had different trajectories,
which were themselves determined by the
politics of the Cold War. The economies of the
capitalist regimes were infused with ¯ ows of
capital in both intergovernmental aids and
private foreign investments, while the com-
munist countries were starved of any devel-
opment funds; both by the same developed
capitalist West. The West, particularly the US,
was willing to support any government in
Southeast Asia, however brutal and corrupt
the regime might be in its abuses of power in
national wealth and human lives, as long as it
continued to suppress communism. For the
regimes in power in these countries, contin-
ued suppression of communism became
`merely’ part of the continuous `nation build-
ing’ struggles. Indeed, suppression of commu-
nism and generally the political left was
reformulated as one of the necessary condi-
tions for economic growth and national devel-
opment.
Rewriting of oppositional political activi-
ties as a `communist insurgency’ intensi® ed in
capitalist Southeast Asia. Left-wing individu-
als were jailed, deported or removed from
jobs in public and quasi-public sectors, such
as unions and schools, as the newly consti-
tuted `national’ states penetrated and deep-
ened their administrative control of the
societies. Among the new states that chose the
capitalist road to national development, In-
donesia was alone in allowing the Communist
Party of Indonesia (PKI) to participate in par-
liamentary politics in the immediate years af-
ter independence. This, however, came to an
abrupt end in 1965, when huge numbers of
communists were massacred and communism
was banned, after an alleged failed coup by a
group of supposedly communist-sympathiz-
ing military generals. The alleged coup re-
sulted in the disposal of the founding
president Sukarno, who was replaced by Gen-
eral Suharto Ð who was to rule Indonesia for
the next 30 years through a web of corruption
and patronage, until his own fall from of® ce
during the 1997 Asian regional ® nancial crisis.
In another example, at late as 1987, the
long-governing single-party dominant PAP
government in Singapore jailed 17 young
social workers/activists as members of a
`Marxist Conspiracy’ intending to `overthrow’
the government, under the security law that
allows the government to detain anyone with-
out trial. Coming at such a late date in the

Cold War and given the hegemonic power of
the government, this charge strained the lat-
ter’s credibility not only internationally but
also locally, generally characterized by a pli-
ant citizenry that has traded, comfortably,
economic well being for political rights.
Within capitalist Southeast Asia, sup-
pression of communism was the sine qua non
of national economic development, as part of
the logic of the Cold War. The human and
social costs of capitalism, which were the
ideological targets of Marxist political philoso-
phy, were paid for by capitalism’s con-
sumerist, material promises, which were
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promoted as the prize for the proletarianiza-
tion of everyone as a wage earner. Then, with
the `marketization’ of the economy of the Peo-
ple’s Republic of China, beginning in the late
1970s, followed by that of Vietnam, the tri-
umph of capitalism in Asia seems apparent.
However, the introduction of capitalism as
`market socialism’ appears to have discur-
sively, and perhaps substantively, decoupled
capitalism from liberal democracy. For now it
would appear that there is a possibility of
capitalism as an economic structure coexisting
with a non-democratic polity. Thus, the likeli-
hood of political democratization, often pre-
sumed to follow in the immediate footstep of
capitalism’s ability to spawn a middle class
that will clamour for democratic political
rights has become ever more elusive.
Although the Southeast Asian countries’
responses to the Cold War may be mapped at
the broadly, macro strategy level, obviously
the combination of the political and economic
responses at the individual country level has
its own trajectory. At one end of the spectrum
of the responses was a closed economy under
the authoritarian communist state, at the other
is an elected government with a capitalist
economy. Within this spectrum, one can insert
the illustrative case of Singapore, where the
hegemony of economic rationality and the
displacement of competitive politics obtain
under an elected single-party dominant state.
Singapore as illustration
The PAP has ruled Singapore since 1959. It
was founded, in 1954, as a coalition party
The Cold War in Southeast Asia 483
under the anti-colonialism banner between a
left faction with mass support and a social
democratic faction of elitist, British-university-
educated professionals. The party rode the
decolonization tide to early electoral victories
and was able to remain in the driving seat of
state power through the two-pronged strat-
egy. Economically, it continues to promote
industrialization and job creation with foreign
and state investments. Politically, suppression
of the left continues as a necessary condition
for labour and political stabilities that facili-
tate capitalist economic growth. Long-term in-
carceration without trial, and public shaming
of individuals by extracting public confessions
of communist af® liations in exchange for re-
lease from jail are tactics still in practice
against dissidents deemed subversive to na-
tional security by the minister of home affairs.
Under such pressures, throughout the 1960s
and 1970s, individuals on the left were either
jailed, joined the ruling party or formed inef-
fective opposition parties in a quasi-democ-
racy. By 1968, partly as a result of direct state
repression and partly the consequence of mis-
taken political strategy, the left was decimated
and the PAP began its unchallenged rule of
Singapore.
Economic success under the new inter-
national division of labour, in which low-
wage, low-skill jobs were exported from
developed countries, including Japan, to pro-
duction platforms in parts of Asia where there
was plenty of surplus labour, led to a massive
improvement of employment and material life
for the population across the class divides.
The left was thus twice silenced: ® rst, politi-
cally and then by the oppressive success of
capitalist economic development, as the latter
exercised its material and ideological seduc-
tions on the population.
Because of media suppression and volun-
tary reticence of the `discredited’ left, there is
currently very little documentary resource for
the writing of national history from an
alternative perspective from the of® cial line.
The histories of political struggles during the
1940s, 1950s and 1960s have, by and large,
disappeared from public view, suppressed by
state-controlled print media, state-owned
broadcast media and the of® cial `history’ . In
 484 Chua Beng-Huat
school textbooks and in the public sphere, the
past political struggles have been ideologi-
cally rewritten as the heroic history of the
triumph of the PAP against terrorism, and
against the `idealistic’ (read unrealistic) ways
of those who were vanquished under its re-
pressions.
History is thus the history of the victors.
Re¯ ecting this, the most audacious history is
the two-volume autobiography of Lee Kuan
Yew, the ® rst prime minister for 30 years.
Volume one was unabashedly entitled `The
Singapore Story’, elevating his own life to the
life of the entire nation, small as the city-state
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may be. The second volume is entitled, `From
Third World to First World’, turning Singa-
pore into an icon of capitalist success from the
periphery of capitalism.2 Indeed, Singapore
has been turned into a `model’ of develop-
ment by others who aspire to its economic
wealth, particularly among the existing com-
munist state, which also desires capitalist
market development without having to share
political power with other political parties,
just like the PAP.
Indicative of the dif® culties of breaking
through the of® cial public discourse, in a col-
lection of essays on the signi® cant individuals
in PAP’s ascendancy to hegemonic power, I
had to request that a chapter on the `van-
quished’ be added. To which the editors
asked, `Who would write it’? The question
was not one of absence of expertise but one of
fear that no one would `dare’ to write it; such
remains the fear of suppression among some
Singaporean intellectuals. The writer of this
chapter had to work with the sole interview
given by the most important left-leaning
founding member of the PAP, Lim Chin
Siong, who was commonly recognized as in-
strumental in the rise of the party through his
persuasive oratorical skills in communicating
with the lowly educated masses, to create a
discursive space for constructing an imagin-
able alternative future at the historical point
prior to the bifurcation of the left and the right
of the PAP. 3
In the Singapore context, three individuals
illustrate a range of consequences of the Cold
War visited on left political dissidents. In ad-
dition to the above-mentioned Lim Chin
Siong, the other two are Chia Tai Poh and
Devan Nair. All three were ex-members of the
ruling PAP. Lim Chin Siong, gave one inter-
view in English, before his death in 1996
(Chew 1996). In it, he denounced the inhu-
manity of detention without trial and con-
fessed to losing all sense of human dignity
after being forced to make public confessions
to being a communist, which until today has
not been established as a fact. Chia Tai Poh
was imprisoned for 23 years (1966± 1989) with-
out trial for alleged communism, possibly the
longest incarceration for a politician in Asia.
In the past couple of years, he has become an
icon for segments of the emerging civil society
activists, both within Singapore and region-
ally. Finally, Devan Nair was a radical union-
ist who swung towards the social democrats
in the PAP, thus being instrumental in cre-
ating mass support for the party. He rose
through the ranks in independent Singapore
to assume the largely ceremonial of® ce of the
President of the nation. He was subsequently
prematurely removed from the of® ce by the
government and now lives in self-exile. In
addition to these more luminous ® gures, there
are others among the ® rst generation of post-
colonial political activists who are still living.
The need for them to pen their memoirs is
increasingly an urgent necessity, to provide
resources for alternative understandings of
Singapore’s history. In these `post’ Cold War
years, keeping the silence of the dissidents
audible is a most urgent intellectual responsi-
bility.
In closing
In the late 1990s, the marketization of the
economy, under the homogenizing rhetoric of
economic globalization, had become the norm
in Southeast Asia Ð including politically
staunchly communist Vietnam Ð displacing
previous attempts at socialist economic exper-
iments. Capitalism has apparently triumphed,
proving itself capable of working under illib-
eral, non-democratic regimes of different
modalities. SEATO as an organization had
long been dismantled, a casualty of the defeat
of the US by Vietnam. This paved the way for

ASEAN to expand its membership, taking on
board Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and, ® nally,
in 1999, the internationally pariah state of
Mynmar, against serious international
protests; the European Union suspended con-
tact with ASEAN, as long as Mynmar’s repre-
sentatives were to be present, until 2001.
With the expansion of ASEAN, the com-
munist and non-communist states in South-
east Asia have obviously decided to set aside
the ideological differences as domestic mat-
ters of each member country Ð a cardinal rule
of ASEAN Ð and collaboratively seek further
capitalist economic growth as the region
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struggles to recover from the devastations of
the 1997 regional ® nancial crisis. ASEAN is
desperately trying to convince the world that
its regional economy remains `signi® cant’ to
global capitalism, in the face of a declining
in¯ ow of foreign investment as Europe and
the US are becoming captivated by the mass-
ive consumption capacity of a marketized
PRC. Its current preoccupation is the fear of
being left behind by foreign capital rather
than the resurrection of the ideological cri-
tique of foreign capital as imperialism. While
its effects continue to be felt in Northeast
Asia, in terms of cross-strait relations between
the PRC and Taiwan, the thawing antagonism
between North and South Korea and the in-
creasingly problematic presence of US troops
in Okinawa, in Southeast Asia, the Cold War
has been displaced.
The very ® nancial capitalism that has pro-
pelled the region into the global media and
brought ® nancial attention in the 1980s Ð
being hailed as the `miraculous’ economies by
no less than the World Bank Ð has wreaked
havoc in these self-same economies with the
1997 Asian regional ® nancial crisis, leaving in
its wake political devastation in Indonesia,
political destabilization in Malaysia, greater
The Cold War in Southeast Asia 485
democratization in Thailand, and a Singapore
that is wary of investing in the region while it
refocuses its attention on the global economy.
The general instability in the region as a result
of the ® nancial crisis has exposed the frag-
mented character of the region. The divisions
and cracks that have been papered over by
ASEAN as an organization are now exposed,
leaving each member country in search of its
own future trajectory.
Notes
1. For a history of the failed SEATO, see Buszynski
(1983)
2. The two volumes are published by New York:
Harper Collins Publishers, in 1997 and 2000 re-
spectively.
3. See Wee wan-ling (1999). A collection consisting
of academic analysis and personal recollections
of the past comrades of Lim has been published
in Malaysia, see Tan and Jomo (2001).
References
Buszynski, Leszek (1983) SEATO: The Failure of an
Alliance Strategy. Singapore: Singapore Univer-
sity Press.
Chew, Melanie (1996) Leaders of Singapore. Singa-
pore: Singapore Resource Press.
Tan, Jing Quee and Jomo K.S. (eds) (2001) Comet in
the Sky: Lim Chin Siong in History. Kuala
Lumpur: Insan Press.
Wee, C. J. wan-ling (1999) `The vanquished: Lim
Chin Siong and a progressivist national narra-
tive’ . In Lam Peng Er and Kevin Tan (eds) Lee’s
Lieutenants: Singapore’s Old Guard. St. Leonards,
Australia: Allen and Unwin, 169± 190.
Author’s Biography
CHUA Beng-Huat is an executive editor of
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and a professor in the
Department of Sociology, National University of
Singapore.