Chin Peng

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Chin Peng (21 October 1924 – 16 September 2013), born Ong Boon Hua, was a Malayan communist politician, guerrilla leader, and revolutionary. He was the longest-serving General Secretary of the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) and the leader of its armed wing, the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). A Maoist, he led the CPM from 1947 until the party's dissolution in 1989. Chin was born into a middle-class family in Sitiawan, now a part of Perak. In 1939, at the age of 15, he became a revolutionary and fled to Kuala Lumpur in 1940. He joined the CPM in 1941, and quickly involved himself in local party committees and labour unions in Perak. Throughout the Second World War, Chin fought as an anti-colonialist guerrilla in the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) against the Japanese occupation of Malaya, allying with Force 136, a British-funded covert resistance movement. He was subsequently awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE). As the most senior surviving member of the CPM to emerge from the war, he founded the MNLA and between 1948 and 1960 engaged in an unsuccessful war—known as the Malayan Emergency—to win independence for Malaya from the British Empire. His actions led to the revocation of his OBE by Britain. After Britain agreed to grant Malaya independence and the CPM decided to demobilise, Chin went into exile in China, then Thailand, and waged a second guerrilla campaign between 1968 and 1989 against the now-independent Malaysian government. This campaign also did not succeed, and ended with a final peace agreement in 1989, which dissolved the CPM permanently. He was not permitted to return to Malaysia, and Chin died in exile in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2013 at the age of 88. Chin Peng remains a controversial figure in Malaysia. His detractors condemn him and...