The Malayan Communist Party as Recorded in the Comintern Files

INTRODUCTION
Much research has been conducted on the history of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Prior to
the Hadyai Peace Agreements that were signed in 1989 between the Government of Malaysia and
the MCP and between the Government of Thailand and the MCP, research on the party mainly
depended on government sources, that is, official documents and files belonging to the British
colonial authorities and the Malayan/Malaysian government. After the Hadyai Peace Agreements,
various MCP sources of information also became available to researchers and, about the same time,
a few dozen former MCP members began to publish not only their memoirs but also historical
party documents. The new materials have tremendously enriched the historiography of the MCP.
From their very beginning, communist organizations of Malaya, inter alia, the MCP, were guided
and led by the Communist International (Comintern) which was established in March 1919 and
dissolved in May 1943. Owing to difficulties in gaining access to the archives of the Soviet Union
(USSR), the Comintern files kept in Moscow could not be consulted for a long time. After the
collapse of the USSR, however, its archives were opened to foreign historians. In the past decade, a
few scholars, such as Sophie Quinn-Judge, 1 Kurihara Hirohide 2 and Larisa Efimova 3 have used
Comintern files in research that made references to the MCP. For these scholars, however, the
MCP constituted a rather minor portion of their work and they only used a small part of the
available material. Thus, historical studies of the MCP that consistently and comprehensively use
the Comintern files have not been carried out yet.
For its part, the present work uses Comintern documents mentioned in the Preface to revisit the
early history of the MCP that remains an important area of inquiry because there are differing
theories and viewpoints regarding several basic issues, as discussed below.
The MCP’s Antecedent and Establishment
Prior to the MCP, a communist organization was formed that covered communist activities in the
whole of Southeast Asia (the “South Seas” or Nanyang). For some time, it was commonly held that
the antecedent of the MCP was formed in 1928 as the Nanyang Communist Party (NCP). Professor
C. F. Yong (hereafter occasionally Yong), however, argued that this “established theory” was
flawed. Mostly from his interviews with former Malayan communists who had settled in China
after being deported from Malaya or had left Malaya on their own accord in the 1930s and 1940s,
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