Voice of Malayan Revolution: The CPM Radio War Against Singapore and Malaysia, 1969-1981
Wang Gungwu & Ong Weichong (eds.)
Singapore: S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, 2009
ISBN: 9789810836399

Voluminous works - popular and academic - have been written on how the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) lost the shooting war in the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960). But much less has been said on what happened thereafter. By 1960, the CPM's "long march" from the Malayan interior into Southern Thailand was complete. In a sanctuary far from the writ of the Malaysian and Thai governments, the CPM reorganised, reviewed their strategy and bided their time. In 1968, inspired by the Cultural Revolution in Red China and events in Indochina, the CPM sought for a second time to establish a "People's Republic" in the Malay Peninsula. From 1968 to 1989, the Malaysian security forces and the CPM once again confronted each other in jungles of the Malaysian-Thai border in what was known as the Second Emergency.

In an attempt to subvert the populations of Malaysia and Singapore and win them over to their revived revolutionary cause, the CPM embarked on a clandestine radio war. From a Chinese military base in Hunan, China, the CPM's underground radio network transmitted under the codename Project 691 and on the airwaves as "Suara Revolusi Malaya" or "Voice of Malayan Revolution" (VMR).

This edited volume, for the very first time, reproduces a selection of those broadcasts. These hitherto classified transcripts of the Internal Security Department, Singapore, are supplemented with an introductory essay and chapter introductions that seek to situate the selected documents against the revolutionary events of the 60s and 70s not only in Singapore and Malaysia but the whole of Southeast Asia. This selection is accompanied by a CD containing all available transcripts of VMR broadcasts made form its very first broadcast in 1969 to its very last in 1981.

Far from being a spent force, the CPM had the capacity and resources to revive their ideological struggle against the newly emergent post-colonial states of Malaysia and Singapore for another 12 long years. This edited volume is part of that story.