Emergency and Entanglement in Malaysia's Cold War

An exhibition in Malaysia’s National Museum on the country’s Cold War past notes the end to the “Emergency” period in 1960, just three years after the country’s independence, as an eradication of the communist insurgency that had plagued the country since the 1940s. The exhibit's next date, however, fast-forwards to 1989 with the “disarming of the Communist Party of Malaya and the restoration of peace.” The omission of thirty years is explained as a largely uneventful period of growing prosperity, culminating in the “racial harmony” of the contemporary era. Yet far from ending the insurgency in 1960, widespread violence persisted and continued to dominate state discourse throughout the Cold War. Instead, the post-1960 period, known as the “Second Emergency,” catalyzed sweeping, cross-governmental programs designed to combat the perceived security threat, many of which entrenched official policies that explicitly favored ethnic Malays over ethnic Chinese citizens, who constituted a majority of communist party members. Rather than an unremarkable period, the post-1960 era was therefore arguably one of heightened tension and mobilization compared to the previous decades.

This paper examines how Malaysia attempted to counter Cold War communist insurgencies by launching a joint state development program that aimed to deter individuals from joining or abetting Maoist “terrorists” and, importantly, that continued key deportation policies for individuals of Chinese heritage initiated under British rule. In the process of maintaining imperial deportation legacies that removed “undesirables” overseas, the nascent Malaysian state engaged in racialized policies that explicitly aimed to reshape its population to favor a Malay-majority ethnostate. While attempts to erase this period from official narratives persist, a reexamination of Malaysia’s Second Emergency reveals that anti-communist, anti-Maoist, and anti-Chinese state organizing efforts remain an influential but overlooked motivator for the formation of a unified (Malay-centric) national narrative from the colonial era to the present.