Singapore Stories: Language, Class, and the Chinese of Singapore, ...

The End of Empire

The outbreak of the Second World War and the subsequent fall of Malaya and Singapore to the Japanese transformed the social landscape of politicised favouritism, with the animosity that the Japanese felt toward the Chinese in Singapore due to their financial support of the ongoing Sino-Japanese conflict. By 1942, a significant number of Chinese were politically active, having been involved in anti-Japanese demonstrations and boycotts as well as campaigning to raise funds to contribute to the Chinese war effort. ⁴⁸ During the last days of the struggle for Singapore, the colonial administration authorised the formation of an irregular militia unit comprised entirely of Chinese volunteers and commanded by British officers.

The Singapore Chinese Anti-Japanese Volunteer Battalion, designated “Dalforce” after its commander, John Dalley, had little influence in the course of the battle even though it was involved in the desperate fighting on the first night of the Japanese crossing of the Johor Straits. After the final collapse of the defences on the island, many Dalforce members fled into the jungles of Malaya, where, along with other Chinese caught up in the growing tide of nationalist fervour, they comprised the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) and its associated Malayan Communist Party (MCP). ⁴⁹ Armed, instructed, and resupplied by British Special Operations executive members with a view to conducting partisan activities on Japanese installations, by 1945 the MPAJA and MCP had developed into a powerful military entity, counting among its members thousands of working-class Chinese speakers. ⁵⁰

The fall of Singapore to Japanese forces in 1942 also brought an abrupt end to the early colonial phase of history writing, as the scholar-administrators were either interned for the duration of the conflict or fled during the last days of the siege, and the return to British rule after the conflict in 1945 can be regarded as the start of a second period of history writing in Singapore, the late colonial phase. The British would return to a Singaporean society dominated by nationalist and Socialist