| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the forced resettlement of more than 500,000 ethnic rural Chinese during the Malayan Emergency that lasted from 1948 until 1960. The phrase “winning the hearts and minds of the people” encapsulates the British narrative of economic uplift and development, evident from the naming of sites that rural Chinese were moved to as “New Villages.” This justification of Cold War counterinsurgency strategy through development is apparent in the British pamphlet, “The Story of Permatang Tinggi New Village,” which casts rural Chinese as a primitive people without history, transformed into productive and loyal citizens after resettlement. Yet, oral histories and cultural productions by resettled villagers challenge this, as seen in the essays and poetry of villager Wong Yoon Wah. Whereas the British presented rural Chinese as rootless squatters, Wong portrayed another world in which the longstanding Nanyang connection to the ecology of the tropics manifest in fish who live in ponds beside tin mines, and bats whose night time flights of pollination are upset by the chaos of the Emergency. His writings counteract “hearts and minds” by reclaiming the rural jungle in which they worked and lived as homelands lost to British resettlement.
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