ANARCHISM IN MALAYA, SINGAPORE AND MALAYSIA:
– The The emergence of a workers’ and anarchist movement
– Anarchist Agitation
– The rise and destruction of the anarchist movement
– In modern Malaysia and Singapore
by Vadim Damier, Kirill Limanov
The emergence of a workers’ and anarchist movement
The British Malaya, which consisted of the Straits Settlement colony (Singapore, Penang, Malacca), the Federated and the Non-Federated Malay States under the British protectorate, at the beginning of the 20th century, turned into one of the centers and a kind of foreign base of the Chinese revolutionary movement. Chinese immigrants began to appear on the Malay Peninsula in the first half of the XIX century, but at the end of the century their inflow increased sharply. The main area of their employment was tin mines, and then timber harvesting and other industries. The British authorities actively encouraged the import of labour from China and India. During the first decade of the twentieth century, only 150,000 to 200,000 immigrants from the Celestial Empire traveled to Singapore every year, and although many of them, after working for a while, returned home, a growing number of people remained in Malaya. In 1911, almost 917 thousand Chinese lived on the peninsula, which was more than 34% of the population. Of these, 225 thousand worked in difficult conditions at tin mines (1). Chinese residents also prevailed in the cities: among them were workers, employees and other intellectuals, as well as the richest businessmen and traders. In cities such as Penang and Malacca, the Chinese were the overwhelming majority.
The Chinese of Nanyang (« South Seas », as they called the region of Southeast Asia) were mostly from the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian. In Malaya, they were not under the authority of the imperial government in Beijing, and this allowed spreading oppositional and revolutionary sentiments among them.