Nietzsche, Heidegger and Colonialism: Occupying South East Asia 9780367547875, 9780367547943, 9781003090618

Citation preview

Nietzsche, Heidegger and Colonialism

This text argues that Nietzsche’s idea of invalid policy that is believed to be valid and Heidegger’s concept of doubt as the reason for a representation are essentially the same idea. Using this insight, the text investigates vignettes from colonial occupation in Southeast Asia and its protest occupations to contend that untruth, covered in camouflages of constancy and morality, has been a powerful force in Asian history. The Nietzschean inflections applied here include Superhumanity, the eternal return of trauma, the critiques of morality, and the moralisation of guilt. Many ideas from the Heideggerian canon are used, including the struggle for individual validity amidst the debasement and imbalance of Being. Concepts such as thrownness, finitude and the remnant cultural power of Christianity, are also deployed in an exposé of colonial practices. The book gives detailed treatment to post-colonial Malaya (1963), Japaneseoccupied Hong Kong (1941–1945), and the tussle with communism in Cold War Singapore and Malaya, as well as the question of Kuomintang KMT validity in Hong Kong (1945–1949) and British Malaya (1950– 1953). The book explains the struggles for identity in the Hong Kong protest movement (2014–2020) by showing how economic distortion caused by landlordism has been covered by aspirations for freedom. R.B.E. Price is a lecturer in law in the Faculty of Business, Law and Arts at Southern Cross University, Gold Coast, Australia.

Routledge Studies in Modern History

Combatants and Civilians in Revolutionary Ireland, 1918-1923 Thomas Earls FitzGerald Alfred Raquez and the French Experience of the Far East, 1898-1906 William L. Gibson The Hispanic-Anglosphere from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century An Introduction Edited by Graciela Iglesias-Rogers Nietzsche, Heidegger and Colonialism Occupying South East Asia R.B.E. Price Eurasian Empires as Blueprints for Ethiopia From Ethnolinguistic Nation-State to Multiethnic Federation Asnake Kefale, Tomasz Kamusella and Christophe Van der Beken Atlantic Crossroads Webs of Migration, Culture and Politics between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, 1800-2020 José Moya Food History A Feast of the Senses in Europe, 1750 to the Present Edited by Sylvie Vabre, Martin Bruegel and Peter J. Atkins Engaging with Historical Traumas Experiential Learning and Pedagogies of Resilience Edited by Nena Močnik, Ger Duijzings, Hanna Meretoja, and Bonface Njeresa Beti Chinese Theatre Troupes in Southeast Asia Touring Diaspora 1900s —1970s Zhang Beiyu For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/history/series/MODHIST

Nietzsche, Heidegger and Colonialism Occupying South East Asia R.B.E. Price

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 R.B.E. Price The right of R.B.E. Price to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-54787-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-54794-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09061-8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by SPi Global, India

For my nephew, Harry Price

Contents

List of abbreviations viii Glossary ix  1 Openings

1

  2 Heidegger and Nietzsche

21

  3 Statues: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (1963)

33

  4 Judging Occupied Streets, Hong Kong (2014–2018)

41

  5 Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong (1941–1945)

54

  6 Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators, Hong Kong (1941–1944)

67

  7 Fading Validity: KMT Nationalism in Hong Kong (1946–1950)

81

  8 Representing Christendom: Singapore’s Maria Hertogh Riots (1950)

95

  9 The Commission of Inquiry into the 1950 Singapore Riots (1951)

104

10 The KMT in British Malaya: Failing Futurism (1950–1953)

111

11 Lee’s Favourite Communist, Singapore (1956–1969)

121

12 The Recurrence in British Interventions, Singapore (1962–1965)

136

13 Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong (2019–2020)

149

14 Closings

172

Index 179

Abbreviations

BAD BS CCG CCP CIA I.L. J.D. HMG KMT KMTRC LEGCO MCP MP MLRA NDRA PAP REP UMNO

Base Activity Diary Barisan Sosialis chinese communist government Chinese Communist Party Central Intelligence Agency Inland Lot Japanese Deed Her Majesty’s Government Kuomintang Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee Legislative Council (Hong Kong) Malayan Communist Party Member of Parliament Malayan Races’ Liberation Army National Democratic Reconstruction Committee People’s Action Party Register of Enemy Properties (Japanese Occupied Hong Kong) United Malays National Organisation

Glossary

MERDEKA PADANG TUNKU

Independence Large, central, flat area set-aside for ceremonial purposes Prime Minister (Malaysia)

1 Openings

In 2019, the Hong Kong CBD brimmed with post-colonial anguish. Hundreds of thousands of people marched, remained, or occupied in protest. ‘Running like water’ around tear gas smoke and police lines, they succeeded in disrupting the space used by others. Some went nowhere. They barricaded themselves in. They took up space and waited. 'Occupation’ has an older provenance, too. It was an enterprise of colonialism and how it prevailed. Starting with the construction of a colonial railway from a mine to a seaport, this locked up land on either side for so-called ‘settled’ purposes. Both types of occupation filled up a place with unusual energy. Both displaced perceived emptiness. They challenged incumbency. My chosen context for philosophy – occupation – mainly refers to the practice of entering and remaining in a foreign country to exploit its resources. The obstruction of protesting crowds the world over is also witnessed here. Wanting to know why one person, in one example or another, takes ground from another does not compel my inquiry. I do not wish to historicise occupation. I want to philosophise it. A recent flurry of interest in the crossovers between Nietzsche and Heidegger begs their merging in a narrative of colonial occupation history.1 Of the two philosophers, only Nietzsche had a focus on occupation in its colonising sense. Heidegger had troubling thoughts on German nationalism culminating in a Nazi infatuation. Citing the rise of the Germans in the same breath as the Greeks, he wrote about ‘confrontation’ with foreign thought as a means of philosophical progress in the West.2 On home soil or abroad, Heidegger wanted to beat foreigners, if not quite drink their blood. Nietzsche saw Western jingoism for what it was. He held what he took to be a realistic approach to conquest. On one hand, ‘the nation that has given up the dream of conquest has already given up the dream of living’3. On the other hand, ‘the reign of good nature is inaugurated only by the conqueror’s death’.4 Of the two philosophers, it remains to be seen if either, neither, or both will come along as helpmates in an analysis of colonial occupation. Both Nietzsche and

2 Openings Heidegger were philosophers who represented the solipsistic and schismatic tendencies of late German moral philosophy. Despite Heidegger's famed testiness about Nietzschean thought, he was not devoid of admiration. It has been suggested by Carmen that, at various points, Heidegger recognised Nietzsche as a ‘metaphysical philosopher’ despite his God-is-dead ambitions for humanity because he was committed to ‘representational thinking’ conceiving ‘truth as correctness’.5 Heidegger was implicitly metaphysical in outlook. In his later work, he admits no difference between truth as correctness and it as ritualised behaviour in demonstration of faith. In particular, he anchored the validity of a representation in the existence of ‘certainty’ or truth manifested in a practice of ‘constancy’.6 For the mature Heidegger, one holds fast to truth. One does not discover it over time or necessarily become aware of it after an unconcealment. Representations, such as statues or statutes, arise from doubt. Constancy circles and recircles a representation for its human vessel to be assured about its truth. On Heidegger's account, one must return to the representation in a spirit of constancy to keep up one's belief in its truth. Such an idea poses problems for interpreting colonialism and its legacies when it is contended as a normative goal in its time or a defensible reading of history that puts humanism at its heart. As a reason for a statue remaining upright, it sounds ridiculous. What about feelings of certitude anchored in nationalism? How about righteous white individualism? Its bearers should have no way to legitimate their bounties or representations. The relentless racial down treading of colonialism also requires Nietzsche’s glorification of conquest to be deeply questioned. The philosophical centrality of Dasein, or the Being possessed by humans in Heidegger's work, makes it the site for ‘valid interaction of the self and the world’, as Hofstadter framed it.7 What if the world became increasingly less accepting of racism, and its abuse of the openness of Being? The therapeutic demands on the self, in the form of a refusal to act in fear toward others, would be key to attaining human validity. A colonial occupation has a few white people on the top and a lot of other people, usually black or brown ones, at its base. Dasein encounters problems at the outset of a colonial occupation because every racial asymmetry brings with it a history, a pre-judgement into every encounter between white and black. The reciprocity anticipated by Dasein, of the individual modifying the world, and vice versa, was often absent in colonial society. It only gave world-modifying rights to whites and licensed black individual-changing rights to the white world. A Eurocentric such as Heidegger or Nietzsche could hold little appeal as interpretive companions in colonial history unless policies of racism are allocated normative effectiveness in social separation and economic exploitation. Nietzsche would be pleased about the invalidity of racial segregation. It ruled in an unexamined colonial belief in worlds separate but equal. That

Openings  3 our radical equality does not create sufficient doubt to threaten representational certainty is just as worrying in the thought of Heidegger. Heidegger also saw imperialistic endeavour as an extension of a debased technological humanity. He saw no great future in its aims, which were ‘uniform’ and ‘total’ rule.8 Whites might have become convenient machines but they did not necessarily share the advantage of their technicity abroad with blacks. This is such a strange idea if the aim of technicity means anything at all. Living without racialised motives goes toward validity or authenticity under the aegis of Dasein. Limitations on individuals are considered under Dasein to be a hapless product of history. In a village in medieval Italy, for example, it was decided that one family could not become anything other than stonemasons. Renaissance Europe, in another example, decided that West Africans would be removed forcibly from their homes to become slaves working on sugar, cotton, and tobacco plantations in the New World. i.e. limitations on your Dasein, or how and why you have been ‘thrown’ in the way you have, as Heidegger termed it, are vital concerns in writing colonial history. Past destiny shifts, confinements, and trauma never quite go away.9 Thrownness relieves us of looking for the best in an individual because the group pressures speak first and last. The capital behind the grandest buildings or boulevards of the West, and the heroism given example, say, in a Boys’ Own Annual, were stolen generations ago in the colonial rapine of Brazil and the Congo. Relieved of writing civilisation discourses, new motives for history writing can emerge. Once the improvement opportunities for a person or a group of persons is considered more or less settled in the past, their achievements inside their current Dasein space are necessarily limited by the cold, stiff hands of the past. History becomes ostensibly concerned with the quality of their striving. Their unconscious overcompensation, or their openness to reconciling with disadvantage through victimhood, start to look like the norm. One can happily labour in the service of others i.e. validity not relying on a comparison of oneself with the supposed superiority of the Other is wrongly thought to be impossible. Existentialists refer to the facticity of a human life. There is a contemplation of all the events beyond a fixed point in life that could yet happen. Possibility closes off space for Dasein. It opens it up too. When concern for striving becomes the history of organisations, races, or nations, why your grandfather was a communist acrobat who travelled with the circus becomes the product of a perfectly understandable ushering. It is the expression of an environmental constraint or personal unrestraint. There are no black sheep in Heideggerian history. No one is expected to become anything. One's composure here and now determines your openness to address in Dasein. Although this is what matters, many people were robbed without them knowing. Personal pre-history pre-figured Dasein exchanges in the New World and the Old World alike. This is the pity and shame of the New World.

4 Openings ‘Cosmic horror’ was the name given by Russian cosmonauts to a state of mind supposed to affect the brains of humans in space. This state disappeared from speech once it was known that zero gravity was innocuous.10 Gagarin had proved it so. The alarming centrality of Dasein in Heidegger’s work carries a similar risk in pursuit of truth. It is an experimental ontology recruiting for test pilots. Earthbound, Heidegger had no desire to get up to the stratosphere, or anywhere, to push Dasein to its limits. By originating Dasein, he had found philosophical certainty without a test flight, or a joy flight for that matter. The possibility of the future had, by the early 1970s faded for him. Knowing the factical possibility of his existence as it had been thrown, he could begin to contemplate the metaphysical or, as seemed his want, its relationship to Dasein. Some people live their lives to enforce the thrownness of others. These are conceivably the villains of Heideggerian history if we need to think of life in such terms. They are compelled by mysterious forces to do their work. But as they approach it every day, they never tire of it. They act as though other people's property is their property; they apply violence of words or laws in a belief that fame or livelihood is limited. Mischaracterising was their stock-in-trade. For example, the Malay peasants were not lazy people, as their British tutors thought. They did not improve land because that only made its ownership vulnerable to compulsory acquisition by their aristocracy. The British limited the Malay peasantry by supposing their uselessness to import the Chinese and the Tamils instead, and the Malay aristocracy limited the peasants by enforcing their envy. Some people suggest that merit, or the overcoming needed to achieve it, possesses some absolute quality that should not be subject to the whim of others. One often reads of academics complaining that a peer-review process of an article was unfair. It was biased or deliberately misconstruing. Beware, the scorned gatekeeper! There is always some hypocrisy in this. Your struggle of thrownness was somehow special and it has not been recognised. You maintain the barricades. You are not stopped by them. In colonial life, this gatekeeper’s belief summed up the Leftist settler’s narrative. They too denounced the inequities of colonialism but only up to a point of still allowing the publican or the teacher a preferential run. Some individuals believe that they have earned their success. They must drip-feed opportunities to others. They cannot also maintain that their people's violence is good and the Other's is terrorism or expect the oppressed to remember them fondly on their day of independence. In academia, as in life generally, if an individual is lucky, merit gets them to the gate, if not through it. Actions taken because they are thought to make you preferable to other people ought not to be confused with actions that do nothing more than stablise your thrownness. Those who constantly seek credit play as inauthentic a Dasein game as their managers when they point to history, deepen the deficit, or raise the bar for overcoming. The valid, the authentic, recognise their deficit. They wriggle.

Openings  5 They try something else or treat work as therapy or experience in Dasein as its own reward. As a way to write history, an individual's Dasein striving, as well as the push of their community in unison or interaction, form the key elements of concern. The relationship of an individual to their thrownness calls for a special kind of honesty and humility. Members of a ruling elite in a colony were not exempt from reflecting on the performance enhancement that they were allowed as a matter of course. Disagreements between the inauthentic do not affect authentic beings. They strive and work irrespective of the return. A historian or a philosopher measures this striving for reasons that are not always made explicit. Their practice is to look for an optimistic endeavour nonetheless. In a Dasein exchange, the elasticity of the world to truth should be as highly valued as the fitness of a being to absorb truth. The Dasein of co-improvement is seldom written as history, alas, without sneaking in some kind of racial element or a call to civilisation. Historians have as much at stake in questions of truth and certainty as philosophers do. Historian R.G. Collingwood’s definition of metaphysics declared it a search in history for ‘absolute presuppositions’ as ‘commitments we are driven to’ as opposed to ‘relative presuppositions’11. In this thinking, absolute presuppositions were transcendent or timelessly virtuous. Care must be taken in following this path because political leaders can evoke and manipulate transcendence with cynical ease, from the love of nation to the loud sigh of a silent majority, to peace with honour after provoking conflict or sound reasons for a pre-emptive strike. Nietzsche would see resorts to unspoken tribalism as functional untruths made necessary by the will to power possessed by an elite class. Much in his position was derived from the uninspired sparring between Socrates and Thrasymachus over morality being the right of the stronger to exact from the weaker12 and, as Richardson noted, Nietzsche’s thinking ‘was deeply and pervasively Darwinian’.13 Heidegger, in his later writings, sides with the hope in Collingwood, when asking: ‘wherein the essential being of truth consists and whence the truth of this essential being occurs?’14. By positing that destiny can only occur once a difference between ‘truth as correspondence’ and ‘truth as certainty’ has been perceived, Heidegger holds out for truth with the gaze of all-seeing eternity that marks him as an idealist.15 Heidegger would have cause to suspect most statecraft in the name of transcendence, if not as tribalism, then as a lack of self-willed striving after validity. Heidegger's thesis of truth beheld individually and communally over certainty in Being has interpretive clout for a historian, as does identifying its disintegration in a group in failing representations. One can produce a taxonomy of false transcendence to glimpse what a refreshed Nietzschean view of history might look like. By making nationalism into racism, or nation into militarism or war, many ideas once thought absolute begin to look like relative presuppositions i.e. an

6 Openings unsuitable basis for reading history. Renouncing such a building block as nation would appeal to the instincts for the contrary and unvarnished shared by many Nietzscheans. Having swept away the nation as the key to colonial history, Nietzsche's path forward as a historian looks clear. Fresh insights are available by identifying endless re-enactments as a test for overcoming human disillusion or being truthful about the power of untruths, including brutish, racist ones. For Heidegger, the essence of history lays in the unconcealment of processes and entities. He argued that ‘only when unconcealment prevails can something become sayable, visible, showable, and perceivable’.16 Each entity in history, just as each individual, holds the potential for the discovery of essence, which is ordinarily walled-off from his or her sense of validity. If there exists the epochal conditions for unconcealment then history can occur through an alignment of contexts allowing a clearing of self-concealment. Otherwise, all that could be perceived was a screen of 'idle talk' i.e. received wisdom about civilisation, separate but equal, and the ‘dominance of the public way in which things are interpreted’.17 The historical moment arises when a policy's biased effect, underpinning in violence, or dehumanising aim becomes clear in the form of a word or phrase that can no longer stretch to resolve growing contradictions. Concealment pivots to unconcealment. The idle talk of the Anyone falls away. I could root my analysis in representations of the colonial age as Heidegger points toward. Or much the same thing, I could defend the principles of civilisation in a forgivable characterisation of Collingwood. Yet I favour a subversive approach – albeit one I am prepared to share openly. Nietzsche recognised that the untruth of a judgement did not make it ineffective and that, on occasions, untruth formed a necessary condition of life.18 The representation made in colonial certainty put it beyond doubt that the dividends of Christianity would eventually pay out in an emancipatory outcome. This was its ‘truth’. Yet we can no longer point to technology as an example of civilisation's charitable bounty. Colonialism was not about getting around to sharing something. It was pointless to pretend that whites compensated finitude on a racially equal basis. Why reassess the reason for colonial certainty by rivalling it with thencontemporary humanist calls for dignity, as most postmodernist history seems content to do? Colonialists saw such human dignity challenges to their authority from Algeria and Kenya to Malaya in the first half of the twentieth century. They persevered in their course for as long as they could, as if certainty was the unsupported unrepentance of colonial Being. i.e. an imbalanced Dasein in which whites endlessly took things from the world and only gave back clips behind the ears. How did their touch and response to being touched yield them a Dasein? There can be no meaning if there is little vulnerability to epochal shift or potential of action from unconcealment. Nietzsche, even to the point of admiring conquest with triumphal awe, focused on operational untruth or the daisy chain

Openings  7 of uncorrected errors forming a policy that assumed the worst about the colonised population and judged character by the strength of the fighting back. Heidegger had colonial confidence in immunity preventing Dasein shocks. Nietzsche thought racial determinism held sway. These philosophers were not worlds apart. At the centre of every state of occupation was a black hole of doubt. It drained colonial belief in representations as if certain and for always. It must be conceded that ideas such as certainty, constancy, and salvation were elements of a moral philosophy tradition relied on the European colonial push to exploit and deprive other peoples. How can life-validity as a philosophical construct and its contents ('true, good, right, beautiful, sacred, holy'19 for Hofstadter) generate anything but a diagnosis of colonial self-deception or an impossible history of what did not happen? In its time, the old Blimpish self-assurance of the British Empire was scoffed at and scorned, on both individual and collective levels, by anticolonial elements. Open-topped cars were shot at. A checkpoint was bombed on the Queen's birthday. Once one treats the interjections as real, they become an instructive interference with the chauvinism of colonial Being. Gradual representational disintegration paves the way to the first day of decolonisation. Dasein was not exclusively non-colonial. Nor is it only colonial or post-colonial. The shaky hologram of Dasein passes through contexts of temporality that cannot inspire belief in the validity of its bearer – not to themself, or its witnesses. How about constancy as a steadfast refusal to leave other people's land until its resources were exploited? What about the certainty felt for the latticework of racially excluding regulations and them continuing to pass unnoticed as if it would be in poor taste to remember them? Perverted constancy was what it took to stay on top of the colonial pile. The same problem emerged from insisting that the will to power was an example of Nietzsche naturally admiring the cruelties and deceptions of the aristocratic class as they flooded the field. Neither Heidegger nor Nietzsche was an apologist of any kind. Both swim happily in dark currents. They both have tremendous value in opposing. A colonial judgement can be properly received as contestable, fear mongering, rankly unfair, or arbitrary. It may be the epitome of selfishness or the product of paranoid uncertainty or blind hatred. Why not argue for a truth that would have been impossible without there being a reaction to the lie? Truth is elevated to a standard – an expectation of seeing a seldom exercised perfection or justice – that makes practically any kind of historical discussion on its basis fatuous unless disguised in wry asides. Unless, of course, high-minded constancy once realised as antithetical to practice became a pantomime in colonial life: comprised of knowing actors jumping about freely and flag-waving for the delirium of unsuspecting wards. Representations were made safe in the knowledge of the utter ignorance about the colonial Being. The reception of

8 Openings the representation, not the veracity derived from exchanges between coequal Beings, then looms as a preferable means to understand the incidents of the colonial tableau. Recalling in public a sad story on the grounds of self-therapy has become acceptable these days. Making the past into a resentful tale for the admonishment of privilege is everywhere to be seen too. Neither case makes for compelling history nor rises above a partisan rhythm to the story of what happened. Nietzsche contended that we should attain a state of serene diffidence through refusing moral judgements that belong to the ‘purely invented world of the unconditional and the self-identical’.20 Collingwood's opposition of ‘absolute supposition’ and ‘relative presupposition’ would then melt into a single category of subjective decisions in a spirit of self-interest on the white side of colonialism.21One should practice unmasking ideas rudely, in a belief that there was no such thing as unconditional truth. It would be impossible to do properly when cultural deference is the only motive of history. This is to argue against a semiotic deconstruction i.e. one that argues that an audience of history conditions what we can know of it. If we are going to boil the kettle, everyone drinks right down to the bitter bottom. A surplus of relativism can also pose problems for a history. If one readily believes that a colonial judgement that is personally convenient must be untrue, and chops at the ropes holding up this bridge, then what service to history can one be? Nietzsche nevertheless compels us to imagine the world cut adrift from its current foundations. Are you persuaded that the hard is porous, the weighty is light, or that the unjust had sound economic reasons? Only in a world with Nietzsche dare one assume untruth as a founding proposition, if not quite believe that day is night. Heidegger felt affronted by Nietzsche’s view that every generation except his held a conviction that it ‘had the truth – even the skeptics’22. Heidegger believed that ‘in faith rules certainty, that kind of certainty which is safe even in the uncertainty of itself, that is, of what it believes in’.23 Taken at his word, Nietzsche suggests that, by his time, a lens of truth could not be taken credibly to the incidents of history or that history had had affectivity on truth, as his follower Althusser might have framed it. Nearly all the history reviewed here comes from the late British Empire in the first half of the twentieth century. This was during Heidegger’s lifetime and after Nietzsche had died. Accepting Nietzsche’s account, that the bottom had fallen out of sincere belief in truth, the affirmation of principle by a colonial decision-maker could only be a necessary expedient or a trumpet fanfare before the Union Jack finally descended. Nietzsche's contribution was to argue that a judgement of moral certainty or policy proclaimed moral could be false but that did not make it being followed a nullity. Whether it was a willful belief in entertaining nonsense or a sober act of going through the motions underpinning an invalid judgement, did not matter.24 What mattered was whether the policy or judgement, albeit invalid, was ultimately ‘life-advancing,

Openings  9 life-preserving, species-preserving…’.25 Alternatively, those ideas beginning in selfishness or strict constituency bore low hanging fruit as colonial coffers became swollen. Statues representing human slavery are still celebrated. Such a statue did not advance life. It was racist because it denied the humanity of fellow human beings. It could, does, and did remain firmly in place a long time after its use-by date, as did its claim to 'reason' and reference to freedom on the horizon. What about the merits of a competing nationalism in a colony? Viz. antiforeignism responded to a colonial denial of a local person's humanity. In its reactive character, it sought to preserve life and opportunity for locals by denying it to an oppressor. The validity of anti-foreign nationalist resistance did not hold force as a majoritarian or utilitarian argument despite the locals holding demographic dominance. It argued instead that the judgements of a minority have a disproportionate impact by system design or were galling untruths that preserved white lives by negating and/or enslaving black lives under military force. Historically this was true. It is philosophically abhorrent now. This invalidity cannot these days be said to be 'species preserving'. Nietzsche was not remotely egalitarian in outlook; he likened socialism to Christianity. They occupied the same basket of humbug. In contemplating the virtue of ‘life-advancing’ acts in his formulation he presumably refers to the astonishing transit of the Superhuman upwards or an aristocrat contemplating the will to power. By mentioning ‘species-preserving’, however, he can be taken to point at the inherent right of a human life to prosper regardless of their race. i.e. the philosophical ideal existed at the same moment in colonial practice as it being deemed untrue or unworkable. We do not have to defer to nationalist elitism – so common in Nietzsche's day – to identify for empathy a human subset under colonialism or to consider its targeted vulnerability to an untrue truth. What takes understanding is that such experiences are by-products of indifference to invalidity, or, as Nietzsche put it, in history, in determining what it values, 'false coinage is the rule'.26 The debate over how Nietzsche and Heidegger were metaphysical philosophers has run its course. The complementarity of Nietzsche and Heidegger now needs to be taken more seriously. So must the application of their insights as a lens to history. The constancy maintained over an invalid judgement possible on the eve of an epoch, or the absence of doubt in a baseless moral position that nevertheless carries life forward, are useful iterations of the same idea through which Heidegger makes an offer to Nietzsche, and vice versa. Both sat in a Cartesian tradition of using studiously established indubitability as a criterion of knowledge even if, on occasions, what both of them thought undoubtedly was racist. So said Heidegger: ‘…constancy is the permanence of that which can never be doubted even if this representing is a kind of doubting’.27 Certainty, or truth, in the terms of a colonial enterprise, could be seen in

10 Openings the Roman Empire's evocation of permanence right up until the years between A.D. 408 and 410 when it finally fell with barely a whimper. Its representations of certainty, about territorial integrity, or the default authority of Roman law, were examples of its doubt that no one could identify. No one dared allude to the realm in anything other than glorious terms. Every international colonial design has the same problem. No empire could rise without simultaneous blindness to the distraction and increasing disparity between its Being and its representations. Heidegger conceded that the reality of permanence is ‘the persistence of representational thinking’28 but does not always tie it to the kernel of doubt inside acts of representation. A persisting person persists for as long as there is not too much doubt. When there is, one is primed for unconcealment. The reality of permanence and the all-time indubitability of truth are held aloft by frail humans. Those people who have the prerogative to persist in representation-making rule over others. The quality of a representation as an irrefutable future reality is invoked by every Prime Minister who approaches the dispatch box to talk about who will or will not be on the right side of history. Such rhetoric is less well-suited to the needs of a colonial governor or colonial secretary whose role, as exploitative military occupants, was to see that history did not acquire too quick a tempo. The certainty in a representation is something its feeler cannot (will not) be budged from. It arises in colonialism as a result of nationalist chauvinism intermingled with Christian ideas of duty. In a modern democratic context, certainty finds expression in a notion that we might be in a transition but that we all know where things are going. Those who importune the righteous at this moment in time shall have eternal ignominy. The more one thinks about the political value of holding certainty, and persisting in its representation, the less the colonial and post-colonial divide seems to matter. Techniques of colonialism change over time. Yet a recurrent loop continues in the presumption of the stronger to interfere with the weaker. The decay of certainty presaged by Nietzsche was contested by Heidegger, who allowed doubt to cause representation but not undermine it. This has not been a prominent approach to colonial-era occupation studies although its appeal is obvious. Likewise, the decentred character of Heidegger's conception of human Being or Dasein, as ‘the between’ of an objectively present subject and an objectively present object,29 has made few appreciable marks on history narratives except for Hofstadter. How can the contours and straight lines of colonial history be given a meaning by using philosophical concepts such as certainty and validity in a manner more profoundly than those approving current historiographical readings? These assume that the colonial secretary was a great and justified man merely by putting his slippers on in the morning. Distinctive Heideggerian positions on human Being, representation, and truth have not been often adopted explicitly as tools of analysis in

Openings  11 occupation history studies. In contrast, Nietzschean propositions about ‘truths [as] illusions about which one has forgotten’30, humans aiming beyond humanity, or identifying the re-enactment of trauma as an eternal return, or being truthful about the power of untruth. These ideas have each permeated the practice of historical narrative much more obviously. The will to power has been trendy. In his spray of ideas, Nietzsche might be elevating a normatively obvious blasphemy to a principle of life. Heidegger could be tackled as being so abstractly concerned as to have no interpretive scheme to offer historical machinations, whether impulsive or considered. Thus, it is useful to ask: ( 1) What does it mean to produce philosophically-directed history; and (2) Do thinkers such as Heidegger and Nietzsche deserve a prime place in historical narrative-making? On point 1, much has been written. Usually, it is the work of philosophers trying to imagine what a historian should do. Hofstadter opened with, ‘history is the last stage of objective mind whereas philosophy is the culmination of absolute mind’.31 He argued that ‘one of the most fundamental problems of historical method is that concerning the nature of objectivity and truth when these have to do with the kind of understanding required of the historian’.32 Imagine that. Historians who are not worried about what their friends think. He contended that history is ‘inescapably philosophical’ because it is concerned with ‘the fundamental drive of human life … toward its own existential validity’.33 When what the subject thinks about themselves is history, why care about what historians think? At this point, Hofstadter reveals himself to be a Heideggerian. The historian steps up as the narrator of the ‘striving interplay of man and world’.34 He, therefore, suggests that a human life in its time is constituted by a struggle to define itself against forces of anomie in the world to produce ‘some degree of reciprocal fitness’.35 There's a key phrase. It is a means of generating historical commentary. Hofstadter tells us that Heideggerian history is a measurement of individual striving in a world that also contains institutional support and constraint as well as the energies of communal life informing the validity of an individual. By supposing the internal validity of a human being is the prime concern, it is possible to avoid ‘the absurd belief that our criteria of importance must have prevailed in the past’.36 In Hofstadter’s schema, the focus on object/representation positions a ‘group…drive’ using ‘a creative impulse toward the shaping of a valid life form itself’ but it can be lost, follow an invalid path, and cause the group to fall apart.37 The unnerving prospect of impermanence, or increasing instability feeding psychological ritual, could have nothing to do with the

12 Openings fragmentation of certainty in a contra-nationalist conflict in the colonies. The other side might just have a lot more guns and their preparedness to use them might prove unreflective. Persistence in representation could be counter-productive to the imperial project once a penultimate stage in colonial rule had been reached. The gap grew between self-diagnosed benign British rulers and the deep effect of their policies (despite not dreaming of representing their gnawing doubt and nihilism). Hence, remaining in the colony but opting out of its explanation in favour of bureaucratic order and emotional absence. There proliferated fantasy retreats supplied by known quantities within an occupied zone that only British people could enter. In such places, white subjects knew that no mirrors would be held up to their faces. The colonial conflict created a desire to be left alone in a way only otherwise possible if the colonials did just go home. Certainty in transition, assailed increasingly by doubt, centred not on salvation through persistence, but small target hopes for a quiet family Christmas with all the trimmings on a squaddie base in Yemen or collecting telegrams from a recreated Hampstead newsagency of stone on an equatorial hill station in India with a bell on the door. Over the coming pages, this resort will also be seen in the British consular insistence after independence that they were no longer rulers, only advisors or sources of suggestion. In the rolling of Nietzschean eyes, colonial transition, although always underway, even when it had officially ended – never eclipsed a higher compulsion to interfere, to a dominion ever-recreated in colonial share prices and the erection of stately country halls on the other side of the world. This phenomenon seems to be no small echo of eternal recurrence and its contradiction. i.e. it is both a play for 'self-eternalisation' but also capable of painful reminders because it is ‘as selfless as it is goalless’.38 Without a reading of history, a former imperialist would seem to have no cause to act concerning a constitutional crisis in an old colony other than sentimental or linguistic affinity. The reality is that such a crisis triggers old trauma, keeps it fresh, and although that is bad for business, renouncing or being forced away from rights established in history is panic-inducing to old colonials. For Heidegger, ‘the certainty of representational thinking’ is maintained by Christianity through cultural means long after it has lost what could be termed, direct political power.39 The sense of carrying the day in colonial life because it was the Christian thing to do cannot, in its originalist assertion on a multi-faith environment, avoid an accusation of it being the foundational trauma around which looped later colonial and postcolonial traumas. One cannot simply say that Christianity summoned the right to win and then neglect to mention what its consequences were for non-Christians. On point 2 – Heideggerians love to tell the world how they would write history. Nietzscheans get on with writing it. Quite often they leave you to figure out that the Great Prussian’s hidden hand guides them.

Openings  13 Before one becomes engrossed in questions such as why the contradictions in Heidegger's reputation exist, or whether Nietzschean thinking, overexposed as it is, can offer a fresh perspective, one must first ask: should philosophical ideas grapple with history? In the case of Heidegger, it is not a matter of summoning him out of his closet – it is to ask why his interpreters often prefer to see him stay there. Remember the question of whether Heidegger and/or Nietzsche should have any prominent place in assembling history? Both held that the conditions of the truth of history deserve to be known and explicated. One allows room for non-fatal doubt in striving for certainty and its representation (Heidegger). The other is fine with the shameless rule of the untrue alongside the true (Nietzsche). Both enter the past with ideas for investigating the truth of what did or did not occur. The filter used by each to discern truth both enlightens history and simultaneously blinkers it. In Nietzsche’s case, as one critic put it, ‘he is too entangled in the situation he is trying to clarify’ and this disqualifies him from using ‘a species of aerial photography of the human predicament’40. Heidegger, by his admission, could recognise his certainty as subject to ‘disattunement’ and this was something which although ‘temporary’ was akin to ‘straying and confusion’.41 By taking each philosopher at their word, and mediating as little as possible in the interpretation of the history that they yield up raw, you can go to any place they will take you, as spontaneously as a spark off a flint. History is written as a white-knuckled grip on a bucking philosophical principle, not to be used as an occasionally convenient companion, or something generally identified in the atmosphere of an epoch. To see Nietzsche go without filter or concern for consequence, look no further than historian John Hunter Boyle's assessment of Wang Jing-wei. Wang was regarded by the Rightist strands of the KMT, the Americans, the British, and in the current of history, as a discredited and opportunist leader. He betrayed his country by collaborating egregiously with Japan during its occupation of China in her darkest hour. Not so Hunter Boyle. He saw Wang as a bearing ‘the efficacy of personal rectitude’, as a man whose ‘deficiencies in the area of political consistency were compensated for by personal integrity and courage of a high order’.42 Hunter Boyle held an instinctive disregard for national sides or the readings of victors. His history marks the finest use of a Nietzschean method. He does not suppose the validity of an established historiographical morality about a leader or a movement. Seen in Heideggerian terms, the interaction and striving of Wang regarding Confucian standards for living attested to his validity too. Hunter Boyle had taken the standards of Chinese culture to measure the truth of his biographical subject; something unthinkable to someone trained only in the Western traditions of the nation. Or, Hunter Boyle indulges in a familiar Nietzschean folly, he reaches for a ‘false equivalence’ to question a moral standard.43 My charity toward Hunter Boyle’s choices is limitless.

14 Openings It matters little whether a historical reading springs from the moral ambivalence of the author or their assessment of their subject against clear criteria – as long as it is done consistently. Historian Lee Benson rued the fact that in the writing of history ‘assessments of the relevance and significance of data’ have been ‘left largely to personal judgement’.44 Insiders of historiography once subscribed to truth inside established limits. The bandwidth for truth to fall inside had become too broad for Benson by the early 1960s. Identifiable outsiders with a different standard, yet who remained true to it, were regularly ignored in the historiography — be they Nietzschean, Confucian or Heideggerian – a fact not lost to the likes of Hunter Boyle whose ejected-from-the-club scholarship has ensured his obscurity. Philosophers who are part of the orthodoxy in philosophy become unorthodox when daring to be methodologists in history. The notion of a united approach to a standard for truth in history has collapsed spectacularly since Benson's day. The DIY approach to narrative has proliferated. Professional historians these days struggle pathetically to exert control through the guild and institutional levers on publication. Nevertheless, pointing a philosophical principle somewhat dogmatically into the curtains of history, in an explicit manner, simply to test how much light it sheds on the stage, be it a Nietzschean, Confucian, or Heideggerian assumption, has become quite an unusual occupation in the writing of history. Nevertheless, it is close to history written in a reappraisal of a unifying truth standard, idealistic or otherwise. Benson could not expect better given the identity schisms of postmodernity and how history has come off the boil as a pure academic discipline. The twilight writings of Heidegger and the morality-stripping instincts of late-career Nietzsche suggest a possibility of imperfection in a unique philosophical prescription for the colonial world. My hands are used to picking at dusty dark green file ribbons. I am never able to retie them as beautifully as they were when first presented to me. What decides the format of the book? First, a little Heidegger tousled by Nietzsche, and second, a discussion of how the resulting formulation interprets the representation one could dub, ‘Colonialworld’. A place received as a fraction and proffered unconditionally, Colonialworld cannot be sound when uncritically made whole, nor ethically remodelled from what it seems to be. The archive's active modus in distortion reminds me that the reconstitution of any world from it sorely needs a theory – an ignored representation or a dishevelled morality – so that the sane can return home after a day of labour. Colonialworld misrepresents its motives. When it is based on an undisclosed certainty or has carriage despite a lapse in constancy, or awareness of its doubt, it flirts with invalidity. Heidegger is sometimes thought to be too abstract to be turned into history, or too open to the metaphysical to bend closer to an earthly schema. Such views need to be brought back to the pack. No philosopher benefits

Openings  15 more from a bit of Nietzschean coarse reading than Heidegger. Heidegger dominates the first half of the book and Nietzsche brings the second half home with a wet sail. Whenever possible, and desirable, my two guiding lights are merged into one habituated idea through which to see history. What ground does this book cover? Chapter 1 introduces Heidegger’s key idea of a representation as the product of doubt. I also outline Nietzsche’s similar concept of an invalid judgement followed as if it were valid. I also stake out the terrain of a history of South East Asia written in the lights of Heidegger and Nietzsche. If affective uncertainty or untruth were conditions of Asian colonial states in the second half of the twentieth century, what kind of history could be written from such insight? Chapter 2 trials the interpretive schema established earlier. How does one read the hesitance of the Malay government of Kuala Lumpur to evict colonial-era British statues from their place of honour six years after independence? It ignored U.S. foreign policy expectations by, in Heideggerian phrasing, showing their assurance or representing their certainty in sovereign nationhood. Instead, the hope that was briefly given by the Malayan-dominated government, when it eventually took down the statues and replaced them with nothing, was for abstention from representation. This decision respected the multi-racial nature of Malaysia. A Nietzschean reading of this episode is also possible. Reluctance to remove the statues was the result of an invalid colonial judgment to erect the statues in the first instance - followed by the Malays nostalgically as if valid after the departure of the British. They were not keen on expunging British chauvinism or acknowledging what Nietzsche would regard as an invalid judgement that had at last failed. Chapter 3 pauses my historical review in favour of a controversial site of post-colonial re-occupation. It offers an analysis of the 'judiciary talk' used in sentencing judgments in 2018 about Hong Kong's 2014 Occupy protests and civil disturbances. Judiciary talk is certainty in representation, which, when appealed, turns doubt into justice. Judiciary talk's selflegitimating intonation of solemnity is tempered by doubt that it could be appealed to a higher court - at which point, doubt is called 'justice'. The post-colonial judicial tone heard in 2018 invoked the high church invalidity dispensed from palm to pine in the old, white days. Pivoting to Nietzsche suggests that the modus of law lies in producing a plausible ground for authority and repeating invalidity under its guise. Chapters 4 and 5 merge Heidegger and Nietzsche. They survey the shifting protocols in naming the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong to their imposition of tax on a cynical and extortive basis. There, wartime rule was characterised by uncertain representations of authority at a time when the bankruptcy of British colonial judgement was on full display. Much Japanese invalidity could have been accepted as valid in the name of a fresh start for the territory but they mucked it up. Chapter 4 contends that the Japanese, by calling Hong Kong ‘captured’ rather than 'occupied'

16 Openings attempted honesty in the title of the colony. It was overridden by conquest-like political behaviour and martial rule that proved unpopular and contradictory. Chapter 5 nominates a handful of Chinese, non-KMT landlords who were absent when the Japanese took the colony but who, instead of suspicion and persecution, enjoyed extensive travel rights and easy buying and selling of property. These people were Superhuman or had an ability to act in a Dasein scene of near-equality with the Japanese. Chapter 6 compares the position of the KMT in 1946 and 1949 and finds that, for all its paradox, the agreement of the British administration in Hong Kong and the Chinese communists that the KMT stood increasingly as an isolated and disingenuous power clique of rent-seekers and compradores in support of Chiang Kai-shek. This demonstrated that the validity of Being relies in part on your representation resonating with your political adversaries; stepping into a Dasein game requires changes to be made in the name of internal validity. Intra-group disintegration over time might be a lesser threat in some cases than abandonment by others, friends, and enemies included, for refusal to genuinely participate in Dasein exchanges. Chapters 7 and 8 make the point that Heidegger raised, on how certainty in representational thinking can be carried culturally by Christianity. It was on display during the Muslim-dominated Maria Hertogh riots in colonial Singapore (1950) and the report of a subsequent commission inquiry (1951). The British colonial government said that the crisis was not a question of whether Christianity or Islam should prevail. It was merely a legal case to do with parental custody. It mattered nothing that the Dutch-Eurasian child had been abandoned during World War Two and raised a Muslim. The British colonial administration achieved a proChristian outcome to the case after making a range of concessions to rioters and Malay police who declined to stop them. The law allowed Christianity to manifest in colonial outcomes without it appearing to be a stakeholder. Chapter 9 considers the pitch of the KMT in Malaya in the 1950s as the one true anti-communist organisation that could partner with the colonial powers of South East Asia to defeat Chinese communist influence in the region. The KMT was rebuffed and largely sidelined by the British colonial enterprise. This was merely the final installment of representational failing described in Chapter 6. This refines the reading of Heidegger by politicising to other parties the representation made by the KMT; the Nationalist organisation could no longer control the destiny or impact of its representation to certainty on other parties. Nietzsche returns and his argument is adapted so that the ridiculous futurism of the KMT after the civil war is seen as an untruth that demanded to be seen as truth. Chapter 10 offers an imprisoned biography of Singapore’s most prominent communist leader Lim Chin Siong. In particular, Nietzsche’s idea that when deeply dubious moral values become known, the bottom falls out, and the resulting absence of meaning has to be managed. I contend

Openings  17 that Lee Kuan Yew’s assault on the remaining, reputedly dangerous communists of Singapore in the 1960s was a cynical ploy appealing to a false floor of ‘reasonableness’ devised to convince the gradually departing British and the central government in Kuala Lumpur that the pragmatism of marginalising and imprisoning communists was owned by him and immunised him from becoming a target of anti-sedition suspicions. This chapter also argues that the period saw the elevation of a moralised guilt in Nietzschean terms placed at the door of communist inmates. i.e. their guilt was not a debt owed to God but the mediocre civic regularity of Singapore constructed by Lee Kuan Yew. This moralised guilt continued to have a half-life after the inmates were released in the undertakings they typically had to make about avoiding politics in the future. Some of the communist inmates are nominated for Superhumanity because they maintained an ideal and strove after it even when it had been made hopeless to achieve it. Chapter 11 contends that the breaking free of normative constraint by the communists of Singapore nevertheless encountered the eternal return of the same Internal Security Act and its condition of repentance for their lifting above mediocrity. The tension between Superhumanity and recurrent surveillance ended in victory for reasonableness. Communist guilt for threatening to expose Singapore's mediocrity seemed a small price to pay. Chapter 12 contends that Hong Kong's protest movement, and its belief in its inspiration by democracy and freedom, comes to the question of explaining the nihilism and anger of many of the protests in the wrong way. Instead, an understanding of the unexamined harm of landlordism in KMT policy development imported to Hong Kong as an invisible cargo after 1949 explains the fury and frustration of the protests. Cares need to be recalibrated from political independence to domestic liveability. Curing the property impotence in the crowded and expensive city will be its independence. There are works of history comprised of case study chapters exposing a particular era or segment of life at close quarters where no theory is implicit or disclosed except the mysterious preoccupations of the author. Theory can take on the quality of hovering, like a poltergeist. Floating gives it eternity above or between the straight lumber that the tales of necessity and development so prize. In my last couple of books, there have been chapters on theory for its own sake. I let its hounds run wild on their own misty mountain. They returned to their kennels a little worse for wear, for the prickle and chill of the world cornered most explanations into wounded partiality or tiredness that only they can feel but never quite express. In this book, I expect theory to be purposeful. I allegorically reveal a truth here or there. I expect its use to be fearless. At least, it should be incautious to a result that initially feels awkward rather than follows the

18 Openings easy glissando of postmodernity shading the principles so they match the grey of phenomena. Theory, then, will be finalised and set on a course to interpret, a swathe to cut, with as little mediation as possible. I am inescapably the theoretician in this case – squinting at and rebuking history. I recognise the high sophistry that can be achieved with words. One can be too in love with them, or one's reflection in them. These are great but seldom-acknowledged dangers for a writer. Whatever my irritation at Heidegger's abstruse and stylised expression, and the pernickety taking issue at being misunderstood, or for that matter, Nietzsche's shock jock tendencies, we must make a beginning with their ideas. You are presumed to be here for a narrative, a road through the mountains, an interpretation fit to love or reject heartily. I will begin by outlining the thought of the later Heidegger, enfold him with a little Nietzsche, before plumbing their amalgam into the colonial scene. Books when written in an obsession of theory, while satisfying for a writer to produce, tend to tell you what went into the sausage at every cost to your desire to eat. There will be no avoiding that in the next chapter. Later ones will enmesh the theory to tell you a story. Bon appétit!

Notes 1 Dombowsky (2018) ‘Last Metaphysician’, 628. 2 Losurdo, Heidegger and the Ideology of War, 104. 3 Nietzsche, My Sister and I, 58. 4 Nietzsche, My Sister and I, 53. 5 Carman, ‘Heidegger’s Nietzsche’, 104. 6 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 24. 7 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 237. 8 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 152–153. 9 Heidegger, Being and Time, 325. 10 Kermode, ‘Gagarin First in Space’. 11 Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, 54. 12 Plato, The Republic, 15. 13 Richardson, ‘Nietzsche Contra Darwin’, 538. 14 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 96. 15 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 97. 16 Heidegger, ‘Vom Wesen Des Grundes’, 443. 17 Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge, 130. 18 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 42. 19 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 244. 20 Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader, 63. 21 Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, 54. 22 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 96. 23 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 27. 24 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 42. 25 Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader, 63. 26 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 208. 27 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 31.

Openings  19 8 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 29. 2 29 Heidegger, Being and Time, 124. 30 Nietzsche, ‘Truth and Lying in the Extra Moral Sense’, 46. 31 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 228. 32 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 235. 33 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 228. 34 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 238. 35 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 240. 36 Sidney Hook, ‘Philosophy and History’, 256. 37 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 243. 38 Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence, 60. 39 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 24. 40 J. Hillis Miller cited in Sheehan, ‘Barbarous Clangour of a Gong’, 30. 41 Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 373. 42 Hunter Boyle, China and Japan at War 1937-1945, 357. 43 Sheehan, ‘Barbarous Clangour of a Gong’, 29. 44 Benson, ‘On the Logic of Historical Narration’, 38.

Bibliography Benson, Lee. ‘On the Logic of Historical Narration,’ in Sydney Hook (ed), Philosophy and History (New York: New York University, 1970). Boyle, John. China and Japan at War 1937-1945: The Politics of Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972). Carman, Taylor. (2019) ‘Heidegger’s Nietzsche,’ Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63(1): 104-116. Collingwood, R.G. An Essay on Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). Dombowsky, Don. (2018) ‘The Last Metaphysician: Heidegger on Nietzsche’s Politics,’ The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms 23(6): 628-642. Guignon, Charles. Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983). Heidegger. The End of Philosophy trans. Joan Stambaugh (London: Souvenir Press, 1973). Heidegger. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays trans. William Lovett (New York: Garland, 1977). Heidegger. Being and Time trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York, 1996). Hofstadter, Albert. ‘The Philosophy in History,’ in Sydney Hook (ed), Philosophy and History (New York: New York University, 1970). Hook, Sidney. ‘Philosophy and History,’ in Sidney Hook (ed), Philosophy and History (New York: New York University, 1970). Losurdo, Domenico. Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death and the West trans. Marella and Jon Morris (New York: Humanity Books, 2001). Löwith, Karl. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same trans. Harvey Lomax (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997). Nietzsche. My Sister and I, trans. Oscar Levy (New York: Bridgehead Books, 1951). Nietzsche. A Nietzsche Reader trans R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1977). Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003).

20 Openings Nietzsche. ‘Truth and Lying in the Extra Moral Sense, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1976). Plato. The Republic (London: Penguin, 2007). Richardson, John. (2002) ‘Nietzsche Contra Darwin,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65(3): 535-537. Safranski, Rüdiger. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Sheehan, Rebecca. (2009) ‘Competing with the “Barbarous Clangour of a Gong”: Why “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” begins in “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”,’ Journal of Modern Literature 32(3): 22-38.

Online References Eye For Film website: Jenny Kermode, ‘Gagarin First in Space’ (Published: 27 June 2014) Avail at: https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/gagarin-first-inspace-2014-film-review-by-jennie-kermode (Accessed: October 9 2020).

2 Heidegger and Nietzsche

Nietzsche comes quite easily to colonial studies. Heidegger comes kicking and screaming. There is little consensus on where he stands. One voice asserted: ‘Plato as the first colonialist and Heidegger, the great anti-colonialist!’1 Another one argued that Heidegger held a pro-colonial perspective. Heidegger's ideas about technology disparaged the end of 'finitude' and the equalisation of humanity.2 On the face of it, his concepts including Dasein, certainty, and doubt in representation, and the conditions for unconcealment, etc., are not precluded from use in a colonial or another historical context. I.e. in principle, it should not matter whether I bring their intonation to recent or ancient events. Easily applied, and well-trodden, Nietzschean ideas include the overcoming of the Superhuman, the will to power, the usefulness of false judgements, and naming the power relations beneath Christian morality to decipher its trickery. The postmodern concern for resistance to colonial rule acting in a way that confirms it also has clear Nietzschean connotations – as if a refusal to acknowledge an invader won the day by untold subtlety or that the invaded simply did not see the roads and fences. Nietzsche is a brawler in history. He comes out swinging with instrumental insights at every chance. Nietzsche loved bombast and amply projected aphoristic self-assurance. He was shamelessly relativist, antihumbug, and looked fearlessly for new terrains for truth without conventional moral girding. As Carman observed, ‘Nietzsche was a great thinker but not because he was in the business of advancing theories purporting to describe the world in a dispassionate, objective way’.3 Heidegger, by contrast, has been deemed a philosophical end in himself. He is not, as one observer put it, in the business of ‘giving an account of’ anything at all.4 He is not regarded as a means to an explanation or someone expecting to be turned in an instant to the advantage of his reader. To be fair to Heidegger, he split hairs not as a ground for acclaim but on major issues and in innovative ways. He maintained, for example, that in ‘the setting into work of truth’ an author might ‘conceal’ the relation of Being to ‘a human being’ in a manner, which is ‘unsuitably conceived’.5 Hofstadter

22  Heidegger and Nietzsche configured Dasein as having internality and externality for a being. An individual being worked towards ‘shaping an internal life-form ... while simultaneously striving to realise it in [their] actual interplay with the world’.6 McCumber argued that Heidegger wanted to ‘make a phenomenon out of Being’ not to describe its characteristics.7 This seems to ignore that interplay unites subject and object within a Dasein space as a being’s sense of internal validity grapples with everything coming at them, from flailing zombie arms and technological change, to inauthentic people who want them to act differently, etc. Alternatively, how is it problematic to say that the friction points in the metropole, colony, or decolonised nation occurred in another dimension? Heidegger positioned Dasein or Being as a proximate, intermediate place of interface between human beings and their world where their striving for validity occurs. By supposing Dasein by maintaining the Greek philosophical distinction between essentia and existentia, Heidegger recognised a dialogue between doing and having done to that is informed by conscience. On Nietzsche's account, if a philosopher is to claim ‘willing …within the field of morality’ then it should be “understood as the theory of the relations of dominance under which the phenomenon 'life' arises”.8 Morality is not an internal barometer identifying the goodness and badness of a situation; it is an external directive to regard one or another situation as good or bad because it will get you a leg up in the world. In that idea, Nietzsche's great capacity to be used in colonial critique could not be clearer. Accurately or not, fairly or not, Nietzsche tended to decode philosophical references to Being as a regressive return to an ‘indestructible, eternal, indivisible’ soul which sought ‘civic rights in science’ by repackaging itself as ‘a social structure of the drives and emotions’.9 In reply, Heidegger’s criticism of Nietzsche was that he forgot the truth of Being in his compulsion to describe its meaning in terms of the will to power or eternal recurrence.10 He was also critical of Nietzsche’s usage in Zarathustra, viz. ‘attempting… a venture with the truth’.11 How and when did truth or certainty manifest in Being? It does not matter that the subject strived under a veil of ignorance in a colonial occupation because every experience holds an inference. A soul might be updated on recent events through social media during CBD protest occupation or sit in the landing module waiting for Huston's instructions about when to begin the human exploration of the red planet. The only issue is the underlying content – the reason for self-belief in goodness or correctness of action taken in the world. An individual's certainty in a historical moment, their loss of a valid feeling after unconcealment prompting truth, requires history written as more than a retrospective apology for a gambit of exploitative civilisation or an account of how freedom became gradually deserved through ripening trusteeship. This is because colonialism always operated through

Heidegger and Nietzsche  23 a period of fraud. A notorious revelation laid bare colonial presumption in a manner that there seemed there was no coming back from. It nevertheless was downplayed through skinny reparations or dubious blameshifting. Colonialism must be seen to deny history its truth for years and induce decades of Dasein stifling. Unresponsiveness or evasiveness to post-unconcealment truth is colonialism's mode. Colonial manipulation of native Being, crude or subtle, must be expected. There are only so many things about which an individual can care. Establishing truth via an intimate experience of care is apt to exhaust. The factors of colonialism seek to make the cares of native subjects few but all consuming, and not so close to the surrounding, concealed worlds as to give the game away. Explanations that the point of Being is to triumph over all others (Nietzsche) or produce high quality striving for existential validity (Heidegger) both have limits. A point was reached under colonialism when no extra effort of a black or brown subject makes any difference at all; a wall rises in front of them to make further progress impossible. This is a phenomenon to keep an eye out for. Calling someone a wastrel or an idler demolished black Being in a moment. What when black labour and intellectual vigour were accepted contractually by the owners of the big house after bonded servitude had formally finished? Reciprocal fitness of the individual and the world could still be confined to measurement by wages for picked weight, and nothing more, because that was the history black labour brought with it. The colonised or slave subject is limited by the history brought by them into the Dasein space. What about the do-badders in the colonial Dasein space? Nietzsche saw an issue of validity not by supposing interplay inside an intermediate space of Being, but the right of the powerful people to extract from the vulnerable. He maintained that an elite could see tyranny as something that takes (1) a ‘necessary’ and ‘calculable’ course or (2) it could honestly take responsibility for ‘lacking laws’ and the vulnerability to the will to power by omission.12 Colonialism is clearly explained in terms of the inevitability suggested in (1). So is post-colonial despotism. Truth or certainty could mean no more than an opportunity for self-absorbed contemplation of white people who are in power in a faraway land because they have more guns than anyone else. Certainty might be supposed as the preserve of the colonial secretary. Such a figure should know exactly when enough is enough and send in the troops. Should colonial elites wish to maintain a correspondence with ‘the democratic instincts of the modern soul’ they could, according to Nietzsche, be no more be casual about tyranny when they encountered it than moral philosophers.13 Among those who are neither eaten nor the eater in the descent to tyranny, there may be white colonial beings who were not aware of how bad things had become. Yet how many people lived such a life under decades of South African apartheid? Unconcealment waited

24  Heidegger and Nietzsche interminably. The overseas television audience waiting all morning for Mandela's release had a small taste of that. In Heidegger's reading, truth results from actions of unconcealment but it does not necessarily follow that this brings about an alignment of contexts where things can be what they really are.14 Colonialism, or any other kind of oppression, demands limits to truth. What is ‘sayable’ or ‘perceivable’ in an official sense was never what was said or perceived unofficially.15 Moral philosophers who identify the cut-off point when suburban detachment ends, and tyranny is writ large and disconcerting, also see the headline story of history. They must be concerned about the contents of Being, and purposeful political interference in it as a colonial hallmark, even if dark days start as fear-irritated bumbling or become a normalised evil that nobody remembers to challenge. Unfortunately, the Leftist settler often saw blood flooding the streets and asked only whether the drains were fit for purpose. A colonial constitution seldom separated powers as a brake on the arbitrary or protected an individual’s rights under an antithetical assumption about state power. When philosophy goes mute about constitutional tyranny, it fails in its duty to describe the world that is through a lens of the one that should be. That, of course, is no business of history until philosophically-inclined history becomes the norm. Nietzsche would baulk at such idealism too. Just as we can think about an individual's Dasein space in this light as living up to an internal plan for validity so can we think about a village, a city, a nation, or a continent having the power and opportunity to live more bravely or fairly than self-sustenance strictly warrants. This is not to say that because a Church of England vicar in a colony hated the use of separate doors to the congregation hall there should a re-evaluation of the colony’s reputation for racism. It is to assemble the factors of reformism in a colony and ask how they fared underneath the dominant will to power or what was the quality of their striving until unconcealment and their historical moment of truth. What if most colonial white people saw in exploitation a representation of certainty that colonial capitalism demanded, but rarely challenged it? The designation 'colonial ruler' could carry such terrible inauthenticity that the Dasein of its bearers could be ruled out of the question. In the context of Spanish imperialism in pursuit of South American silver and gold, this was, as Bohrer framed it, 'the prioritisation of returns on individual investments over the principles of a distributive justice adjudicated on a communal level'.16 Heidegger can be used to detect an individualist colonial politics of representing its judgements. Those about the civilising mission or universalist approaches to natural rights not only disclose its doubt, but give a measurable quality to its inauthenticity. The idea of applying Heidegger to a question of what a recently decolonised state does with enclosed colonial statues – one of my wants in this book – could be made possible by a dose of Nietzschean invective.

Heidegger and Nietzsche  25 To detect the representation in a tale of colonial statuary is not an incautious use of Heidegger. The ‘setting into work of truth’17 could occur by taking Heidegger at his word and observing what happens. He is never to be supposed in an aim other than the one he specifically discloses. Like Nietzsche, because Heidegger impresses as a philosopher who one accepts or declines whole, the tendency to intermesh them in service of a historical narrative remains under-developed. Despite being no great social or historical theorist, much less a useful expositor of his own work, Heidegger in his later writings has a quality of calling out to history as a field of study in which truth remains possible and its pursuit desirable as an object of a methodology. Take for instance his insight from The End of Philosophy: ‘constancy is the permanence of that which can never be doubted in any representing, even if this representing is a kind of doubting’.18 In interpreting such statements one can simply accept the observation that Heidegger’s ‘own unique thought is what it is about’19. Alternatively, one can ask how a philosopher who wrote so much about allegory could suppose that what they discovered about it should be quarantined from whole areas of the humanities, including colonial historical study. Heidegger's message can be interpreted adjunctively. It does not need rewriting to meet a colonial context. The need of individuals and nations to represent themselves comes from a hesitant place into a world attuned only to confidence, or, for the Instagram generation, a world fixated on seeming rather than being. The emphasis in such a case is on public representation. This results from comparison by an individual of themselves and an external version of validity. This creates in those devoted to validity through internal map-making a sense of not living life. Worse, they live a life in which they are systematically ignored or ostracised for not playing 'the' game or the 'required' game, which, by their nature, are games of seeming. These are expressed by a façade completely absent of doubt and nodding to a piously held collective opinion of what success looks like. In a Nietzschean perspective, Heidegger’s admission of doubting inside a representation of certainty could be taken to be much like a judgement ‘that must be believed to be true … even though it still might be a false judgement’20 i.e. invalidity does not cost a representation its ability to affect. This points to how the two giants of Western philosophy find an accord close enough for them to be relatable to colonial history. No one would expect them to be in perfect harmony. In his later work, Heidegger has a quality of sincerity in his reading of Nietzsche. He drops the precociousness tone of Being and Time to take charge of a supple mantle. This is a view not made urgent because the other philosopher had to be proven wrong, or made necessary due to his boisterous ambition. None of these compulsions mattered anymore. It was the fading light that drew him out. We see the word 'salvation' dotted here and there.

26  Heidegger and Nietzsche Nativist ideas of represented permanence or constancy constitute philosophical anticipations that should expose a hierarchy bent on achieving an exploitative outcome in every new moment. 'Should' is the operative word. An idea that the mere act of representation is legitimacy, or solemn truth, is questionable. Hence, the historical obsession with sovereignty. The British Empire jerry-rigged its way toward decolonisation with unambitious security operations. It emphasised its legal legacy on post-colonial relations. The judges who sit in judgment on demonstrators in today's Hong Kong speak the same language that emanated from airy colonial benches. Representation was a way of underwriting the future. I mentioned statues a little earlier and virtue as a historical question. This has taken on a notorious modern edge in the United States where the good old boy relics of the Confederacy continue to provoke controversy. The cosmos shifts and realigns and, until quite recently, times of political instability, including their openness to regression, although disconcerting, could usually be given reason through a reading of history. When Nietzsche stated that ‘the will to power’ was the irreducible condition for life, and what gave history its ‘intelligible character’21, one could be forgiven for assuming that he contemplated statues being erected heroically, in a spirit of dominium, not the circumstances of them being brought to earth in a world questioning symbolism. One suggestion has been that the preaching quality to much of Nietzschean writing, including ideas such as going beyond humanity and the unavoidable quality of the will to power, arose from him wanting to make the world ‘bearable’ to himself, to ‘stabilise inner turmoil’ and ‘to fill a missing void’.22 Although Nietzsche would seem an unsafe bet for psychoanalytical supposition, the centrality of ontology in Heidegger privileges human Being in its own void-filling way. Statues unite the past and the present. As an expression of the will to power, the statue expands upward until its shadow finds its limits. The graven image has its moment. Heroes lose their power eventually. Just like their patrons. Everyone is over-run by vandals. The contest of virtue is eternal; its description is not settled. When a monument to virtue disappears, the power to exalt is exposed as impermanent, a figment. The admired quality that moved an audience to install the likeness of a hero, and elevate it, is discovered abandoned like the statue itself, no longer fixed to inspire familiarity, or prominent. Just as the will to power can fail, and stymied, recede into itself, so does its underlying certainty. When Heidegger and Nietzsche seem on occasion to amicably dance with each other, it is neither an accident nor a contrivance of the light. Sartre lauded Nietzsche’s comment that one should get away from ‘the illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene’.23 What, then, is a reading of a colonial statue if, as Sartre urges, we should busily study an object with phenomenological rigor ‘for it is absolutely indicative of itself’.24 Sartre would presumably observe that the compulsion to memorialise is the only

Heidegger and Nietzsche  27 message to take from a colonial statue. Nietzsche thought that conquest was good. It demonstrated the truth of the will to power. The statue of a colonial figure stands heroically because they were heroic. Really? When the story behind the hero, in scholarly accounts, tarnishes the hero, their bold or adventuring pose goes on standing for who they were into the future. We must maintain an unadjusted view of who they were. Is that so? When Heidegger says that what is real ‘lies in the constancy and continuity of what is represented’ he cannot mean that the statue’s admiring passer-by maintains reality by ignorance of academic research that disparages the represented colonial hero. Heidegger cares too much about truth for that to be an adequate reading. The track record of believing something over time matters for nothing once a disparagement takes hold and is accepted by the passer-by as truth. The statue, when taken down, no longer represents anything. By losing continuity, it loses its reality. Nietzsche desperately wanted to be correct, too. Yet he is put to a choice between accepting worlds behind the scene that give truth to a representation or continuing to maintain that the truth or intelligibility of history relies on us agreeing that humans who fight like tigers win the right to immortality in statuary. If this seems to make a virtue of desperation and chauvinism you would not be the first to notice. A colonial statue’s message cannot be allowed to pass without a political context. Its representation of an actor in the interminable tussle for human freedom stands or falls. Is that level of generality regarding the politics ‘behind the scene’ helpful? By giving the statue of a genocidal white man a heroic pose, perhaps on a rearing horse, what was true and good for a dominant colonial handful totally subverts what was true and good for a black or brown majority. What remains? Making a plain reading of a colonial representation on a workable assumption of its falsity is a likely candidate. Once, when a statue or plaque had to be justified, it was enough to say ‘because this is where the hero found their fame’ or ‘their house was here’. After decades nestled safely in the bosom of state, the representation one day comes under attack because whose virtue deserves memorial has become hotly contested. Heidegger's idea about representational certainty was that it ‘no longer depends on a relationship to something else’, is ‘absolved from the very beginning’ and ‘rests within itself’.25 In this light, the book closes when the statue is erected. It is non-revisable. Heidegger would ask with incredulity how and why the certainty about a virtue could come to fail or could be subject to experience or revelation in history. This would argue that certainty in a colonial setting was never subject to debate or that there was always sufficient agreement about its contents to carry the day. By suggesting that doubt redoubles constancy, even if it cannot be recognised, Heidegger would be no more likely to give up on certainty than a second-rate senior British colonial official in West Africa or Malaya.

28  Heidegger and Nietzsche The later Heidegger expects an attentive reading, but not its adaptation or application to meet new or exceptional conditions or new terrains exposed by history. He would not welcome being identified with poker-faced colonialism. Just like any old colonial worthy, he remained unmoved by new reasons for veneration, and the latest stars demanding it. These fossils just wanted to be left alone in their homestead on the high veldt, or their conservatory in Golders Green, to capture a flicker of the world that had once made sense. The End of Philosophy showed how the essentialism of representation, in a personal sense of certainty, puts humans in a metaphysical schema. This occurred by answering to their Being. Not overstressing the relations of humans, or their political tribes, to each other, also mattered. Perhaps one might notice that one group or another had fallen off-track by pivoting away into inauthenticity. Once certainty is put beyond relation and takes an absolute and subjective individual form, one can forget the destabilising infusion of politics and its implications for historical discussions about, say, colonialism. Heidegger tends toward describing narrow certainty as an instruction for an individual’s fate, not the flux of communal pushback into personal Dasein. This seems to be the trick in Heidegger. Before we embark on our first colonial vignette, it could be helpful to say something about the God issue. Heidegger thought a representation and the certainty beneath it could remain unchallenged or be eternally transcendent if one was only constant enough in its recognition. This became clear in his rebuke to Sartre's idea that existentialism was necessarily an atheist enterprise. In Heidegger's reading, humans are answerable to Being because they received their sense of existence from Being, or put in his terms, before we speak we should 'let ourselves be addressed by Being'.26 Quite apart from what has been said about Heidegger making a phenomenon of Being, he does not dismiss the idea that the individual drive for validity, constancy, and truth could be in alignment with God. In The End of Philosophy Heidegger opens with an intriguing point that I find myself circling around, time and time again – Christianity without faith does not cease to have power as long as it maintains through culture ‘the certainty of representational thinking’.27 At various points in this book, I investigate ‘Christianity’ in this algorithm or couple it, as the need arises, with its dear friend and confidant, nationalism. What happened when through a slip-up or unnecessary adventurism, a colonial state revealed what had been hidden? Christian constancy in culture became visible as the only way to rig a political or judicial result. The value of colonial certainty to a powerful minority of a colony hardened to the point of feeling brittle or to the point of attributing the final say to the national interest. In orchestrating pockets of Christian culture, colonial elites became aware of their behaviour as the playing of a game. Christian certainty was not a righteous fulmination. It was about calling God’s shadow, ‘God’.

Heidegger and Nietzsche  29 Let us raise colonial episodes displaying American breeziness or British discretion as though both confirmed the imperial powers having been ‘addressed by Being’, as Heidegger put it28. Emissaries of both nations tried to stave off critical perspectives of colonialism, with little more than an assertion that Being was endemic to them, or that thrownness crippled the Dasein of black people more than it did theirs. Yet in an epoch of decolonisation, they had to admit the possibility of other destinies. They had to accept that an awful comma or a restrictive constitution would cause a bad legacy. Flashbacks to their own Dasein exchanges kept coming. The guilt had to be suppressed. The relentless clamour for ‘native’ recognition was for the equality of their Dasein. Come decolonisation, the full-blown colonial presumption of internal certainty had passed or perhaps had been superseded by the certainty of a certain, other few. Now a talisman for the whole colonial enterprise, the term primus inter pares could be used as if born to it. The 'Foreign and Commonwealth Office' came into being to suggest the old colonies were family and that the British PM was an avuncular uncle. The feeling of high separatism could not continue. In the long shadows stretching toward now, colonialism could not be remembered fondly by anyone. Those who had been named among the colonial elect were the exceptions. The familiarity went only one way. In colonialism's long arc, its white exponents did not always handle their finitude graciously or rejoice quietly their election to certainty. They often believed that their Being was separate from that of the unwashed. Civilisation's untroubled eastward march over centuries served to confirm this. Nevertheless, Macquarie contradicted Sartre and Nietzsche by contending that Being when 'received' produces a 'more open' existentialism than can be contemplated in atheistic humanism living for individual freedom.29 It is an argument about where existential validity resides. The idea of doubt/certainty in representation, and operative invalid judgements being capable of harmonisation in colonial studies, do not depend on one taking one side or the other. Only white people were thought to have the capacity for personhood in colonial history. This did not stop their reasons for certainty being ridiculed by a multitude of critics. The gradual extension of personhood to the whole chorus-line of late colonialism requires a nativist search for relatable secular, non-communist modernists from local ranks to feature in a suitably oppositional history. The Malayan colonial administration could not continue to insist that the Padang was for the lower grades of the annual inter-colony cricket tournament, not massed civil disturbances by Muslim fanatics, or any number of other Blimpish readings of colonial friction. The lesson of colonialism, then, could lay in the decolonising transfer of personhood and the concession of certainty to a post-colonial native middle-class who had their quirks but were never monsters. It could be.

30  Heidegger and Nietzsche The individual Dasein space can be a testing ground for colonialism or a place to be spooked by a worst-case scenario. To be a patriotic colonial, one needed to go through confined motions, be confident at all costs, and systematically limit the spread of opportunity said to be limitless in theory. Representation of certainty could not be a part of transition or plurality in colonialism for this asked for the paralysis of doubt to engulf a regime. Sartre suggested that it is only through ‘the free upsurge of a freedom’ that we could know the depth and determination to resist it.30 I.e. expressions of freedom, including the making of sinister-looking shadows and actual violence, might in their casting doubt, be temporarily therapeutic to colonial representations of certainty. For example, British colonial administrations acted against the KMT in Malaya by regulating it not only by the experience of what it did but what it could do. As KMT critic Fu Mui Kim once put it, the organisation's 'interference with Chinese schools, the categorical tyranny of the KMT oath, and terrorism, whether actively exercised or secretly feared, were often cited as evidence to prove that the KMT was a dangerous influence' warranting control.31 A colonial representation of permanence found itself routinely tested by oppressed people to find how far away an acceptable degree of freedom might be. The structural strength of colonialism was enhanced by challenges to it. Yet habitual thoughts and acts of freedom over time make arguing against it look inhumane as Soviet influence through Poland and the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) demonstrated. The Berlin Wall went from being a makeshift barrier, to a prompt for AllAmerican candy bombing heroism, to a necessary evil preventing a third world war to, finally, standing as a symbol of baseless authority obstructing the free movement of Germans. Any person or group who entertained a life-affirming position, therefore, possessed a strength that could not be ignored indefinitely. Power and freedom followed eventually. In a colonial state certainty was internally generated, if celestially attributed, and topped up. It remained because the force of arms, or their threat, prevailed. Heidegger averred that the representation of constancy created conditions for certainty and justification. Being seen to take virtue seriously, and surrounding it with ceremony suggesting the instinctive qualities of militarism, patriotism, or legacy, colonials felt a right to occupy overseas places. A period of transition implied that new voices of political certainty in colonised South East Asia needed to be staved off by a conviction that going home would abandon virtue. When an old colonial power lurked around its former haunt, a new sovereign government occasionally needed reassurance on what its certainty should be. In its giving, one saw not so much a puppet master at work as a retired headmaster who had taken to private tutoring. This exact situation provides the context for the first historical adventure with Heidegger and Nietzsche recalling the prerogatives of an occupying power through their

Heidegger and Nietzsche  31 lenses. After that, the duo will serve in an analysis of a more modern kind of occupation; one associated with post-colonial protest.

Notes 1 Love and Meng, ‘Heidegger and Postcolonial Fascism’, 309. 2 Love and Meng, ‘Heidegger and Postcolonial Fascism’, 316. 3 Carman, ‘Heidegger’s Nietzsche’, 106. 4 McCumber, Metaphysics and Oppression, 10. 5 Cited in Fynsk, Heidegger, Thought and Historicity, 17–18. 6 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 237. 7 McCumber, Metaphysics and Oppression, 10. 8 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 49. 9 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 43–44. 10 Carman, ‘Heidegger’s Nietzsche’, 108. 11 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 96. 12 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 52–53. 13 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 53. 14 Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment, 2. 15 Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment, 7. 16 Bohrer, ‘Just Wars of Accumulation’, 32. 17 Fynsk, Heidegger, 17. 18 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 29. 19 McCumber, Metaphysics and Oppression, 10. 20 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 42. 21 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 67. 22 Owens, Creative Destruction, 79. 23 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 4. 24 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 4. 25 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 24. 26 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 10. 27 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 24. 28 Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 10. 29 Macquarie, Existentialism, 29. 30 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 628. 31 Fu, The Kuomintang in Malaya, 9–10.

Bibliography Bohrer, Ashley. (2018) ‘Just Wars of Accumulation: The Salamanca School, Race and Colonial Capitalism’, Race and Class 59(3): 20-37. Carman, Taylor. (2019) ‘Heidegger’s Nietzsche’, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63(1): 104-116. Fu Mui, Kim, The Kuomintang in Malaya, 1930–1934 (BA Honours thesis, Department of History, National University of Singapore, 1976). Fynsk, Christopher. Heidegger, Thought and Historicity (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1993). Heidegger. Letter on Humanism (Frankfurt: Verlag, 1947). Heidegger. The End of Philosophy trans. Joan Stambaugh (London: Souvenir Press, 1973).

32  Heidegger and Nietzsche Hofstadter, Albert. ‘The Philosophy in History,’ in Sydney Hook (ed), Philosophy and History (New York: New York University, 1970). Love, Geoff and Meng, Michael. (2017) ‘Heidegger and Postcolonial Fascism,’ Nationalities Papers 45(2): 307-320. Macquarie, John. Existentialism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). McCumber, John. Metaphysics and Oppression: Heidegger’s Challenge to Western Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003). Owens, Lesley. Creative Destruction: Nikos Kazantzakis and the Literature of Responsibility (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2003). Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984). Wrathall, Mark. Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

3 Statues Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (1963)

In 1963, Kuala Lumpur had stood as the capital of independent Malaysia for barely six years. In the account of an American consul to Malaysia, one morning just before Christmas ‘a gang of Tamil Coolies’ uprooted the statue of King-Emperor Edward VII from its place of honour in front of the Ministry of External Affairs and did so ‘in full view’ of the lunchtime crowd at the Selangor Club on the other side of the Padang.1 They loaded it onto the back of a truck and drove it to the grounds of the national museum. A similar fate befell another founder of British Malaya, Sir Frank Swettenham. His life-sized statue on a pedestal located a block away was also upended that day and carted off to the museum. The Deputy U.S. Ambassador also related an anecdote whereby the British High Commission suggested to the Malaysian government that removing the statues ‘might be a good idea’ but that ‘the Malaysians were loathed to part with them and the idea was dropped’.2 A few months later, the Malaysian government had a change of heart and removed them. What could one make of these events? The validity of the decision to remove the statues does not pique my interest. The validity of the Malaysian government’s decision not to replace them does. i.e. the prospect that a decision in favour of non-representation could be valid. It left space for the imaginings of other races – at the time, a vital issue in multiracial Malaysia. Heidegger's idea of a Dasein space relied on the individual and their community becoming who they were; the singular and the plurality existed in a state of expectation. The later writings of Heidegger were often to do with poetry and technology. He also maintained a sustained attack on the will to power. He contended that openness to truth constituted authentic Being not the domination of space or other people. A colonial moment, like any moment of Being, has a mode by which it can be characterised. By making a choice not to represent, the Malays recognised the domination of the preceding colonial modus and, collectively engrossed in future feeling and foreseeing, unapologetically brought nothing to the present. They acted in the master cooper's ecstatic anticipation of the finished barrel, not some colonial appraisal of their barrel-making skills, there and then or here and now.

34 Statues The American Consul's reading of this affair was that the Malays had failed to 'forge an integrated, nationalistic society' due to the inherited multiracialism of the country. This implied the questions, 'whose nation, whose language, whose culture?'3Also in the American view, "visiting Afro-Asian leaders could not be permitted to see in the capital sovereign Asian state monuments to the ‘hated colonial tyrants’” albeit that this was ‘an epithet that would scarcely occur to anyone here’4. The Malay dilemma, in American eyes, was about having no animosity towards the British but feeling compelled to remove their statues. This had been based on the colonial power 'building the country from virtually nothing' and ruling it 'competently but uninspiringly'.5 Gleaning through these events with a reading of Heidegger cornered by Nietzsche produces quite a different perspective from the benign originalism accorded to British rule by the Americans or the British indifference to the statues remaining – although that could never be what it appears. American and British readings of the case of the statues both emphasised their roles as advice-givers. Nietzsche was intrigued by what he termed 'the psychology of the improvers of mankind'.6 This fits with his general position that everything intended to be moral has at its foundation an element that is ‘unconditional’ in its immorality.7 Coaching the Malays on their political freedom was underpinned by the immorality of the nation. It defined itself by separatism, racialism, readiness for insult and war, etc. By seeking to deliver the Malays from their perceived naivety, a Western homily on the holiness of national symbols seemed in order. This included epithets and epaulettes, episodes to flag, and ones to forget. The Western homily intoned morality but relied on crass, shorthand examples intended to appeal to the Malay sense of injured or vulnerable selfhood. ‘What is real’ maintained Heidegger ‘lies in the constancy and continuity of what is represented in the certain representation’.8 There is a strong similarity between Nietzsche's idea of an invalid judgment followed as if it were correct and Heidegger's assertion that representations of certainty are caused by doubt but carried through by constancy. Invalidity (or uncertainty of truth) compromises a representation or policy measure. This must be accepted as a condition of life and a mode of history. Heidegger's concern for certainty or truth in representation, and its basis in doubt in the first place, is a beautiful prism through which to glimpse colonialism: the modus of colonial Dasein space domination with a future feeling of all materials and other humans. Nothing innocently enters from the world to shape it or contest its claim to truth. Colonised people are beholden to another’s domineering Dasein realm. The prevalence of falsity in a colonial mode of the state is given example by a purposeful and structured incapacity to admit. It lays in a taste for defensive mockery lying just beneath the surface asserting in alternating waves Christian authority or biological destiny. So contended Heidegger, ‘historical-spiritual’ Dasein, or national destiny, was limited in its occurrence

Statues  35 to the chauvinistic apprehension of the Greeks and the Germans.9 It was the ‘Greeks who first threw themselves into that questioning in poetry and thought that is to determine our Dasein’.10 That a philosopher can represent such an idea with unerring confidence as a rule for history places Heidegger alongside the coloniser, not the colonised, although the Greeks were occupied by the Romans and the Germans, by the Allies. Let us suspect that Heidegger’s terms were mouthed in U.S. foreign policy expectations. The Malays did not show their assurance or presume or represent their certainty during the statues episode. Heidegger, like the Americans, would be confounded by the Malay actions. They would not be parcelled up into a normative, chauvinistic European-style nationhood or interfere with the Godly personage believed to be inherent in the statue. This was not representative hesitance but mystical ambivalence that others decided needed a national interpretation. The hope given by the Malays, religious in origin, was to refrain from representation. You do not have to be symbolically decisive or compelled to representation to exist or to rule. Let us not interpret this as a revolutionary message. There is nothing revolutionary about the Malays. To an American reading of the statues episode, the Malays were shockingly unembarrassed by their lack of nationalism or continuing solicitude to the British. This bewildered them. Arrogance was expected of the Malays now that they held the reins of an independent country. As if Jim Crow could be exported, the Americans could not help themselves in the advice given in aid of racial dominance. Under such logic, infused by moderate Sunni Islam, the Malays could only eclipse the slight majority Chinese population of Malaysia by toppling Edward VII and Frank Swettenham and put themselves boldly in their place. The initial Malaysian hesitance to remove the statues was an invalid judgment followed as if valid. They were not keen on expunging colonial chauvinism or accepting that an invalid judgement had finally failed. In an alternative reading, Nietzsche averred that to maintain an illusion of equality, Christianity invented guilt.11 Those who judged themselves superior were obliged to turn on themselves in a flagellating fit of self-apprehension. In this case, the decolonising British could no longer be both superior and guilty. They called on the Muslim-dominated Malaysian government to play that role for them. To begin with, the Malays had to drop their sentimental regard for the feelings of Ol’ Blighty by taking down its statues. Although the British had never been a problem for the Malays, the Chinese now were. Guilt in the Nietzschean perspective resulted in the responsibility of the superior for the suffering of others. On independence, the governing Malays should have felt guilt or at least some shame for letting the statues remain. One can also position colonialism as Christianity without the guilt. The so-called ‘superiors’ felt nothing about inequality. Hence, the Malays initially failing to remove the statues was ‘just not a good

36 Statues look’ for anyone. The statues stirred a feeling that colonisers acted on but were conditioned not to name. ‘It’s just not cricket’ never referred to rules or fairness. It simply marked a personal affront at colonial domination being questioned. Did domination of one by another leading to a perverse Dasein game have to wait until decolonisation for unconcealment? When I remarked earlier that nothing innocently enters a Dasein scene, it was in the sense that no one can be new to the rodeo or that everyone is waited for by dominant forces, or their proxies talking incessantly about competition. This is not special to colonialism but intensified by it. Colonialism is life intensified. That’s what excited Nietzsche about conquest. Being was not to be understood in terms of a stable space but 'in terms of the conditions for the emergence of entities and worlds out of concealment into unconcealment', as Wrathall framed it.12 In the statues episode, the Malaysian government pursued a course of action that unconcealed itself and others on the local diplomatic stage. The condition of the emergence of the entity essence was a decolonisation that had barely occurred. The Dasein of the Malays as rulers, extending into the national-historical Dasein of Heidegger’s imagining, was a slowly and quietly moving centre seeking. This was the unconcealment of their prerogative, of being the one to decide. They were organizing their own surprise party. The British chose to put the bust of Edward VII outside the government offices in Kuala Lumpur that was three times as big as life-size.13 Size, then, stood in for certainty – the bust filled a courtyard. The KingEmperor needed a suitable space to preside over. Here stood a colossus in a courtyard, intent on demonstrations of divinity, who would, one day, have to go, as all brooding titans must. When the statue did, it was not replaced immediately. The vacuity in British certitude was replaced by actual emptiness in prejudicial intent if only to a briefly pleasing effect. Imperialists picked at the bones of colonial history without ceasing. They wanted confirming morsels. When the British Empire's history was slight, it searched for precedents. Talking up the Hittites, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Hapsburgs, or the Ancient Egyptians put a suitable spring in the imperial stride. Nietzsche's great achievement was to declare that history was irrational but that, instead of abandoning it for that reason and falling into despair, we should instead suspect accounts of knowledge and morality that are described as natural, principled, or dynastic. Agents of the British Empire could argue that, in the last half of the nineteenth century, it ‘fell’ to them to ‘make’ the modern world. The episode of the statues provided a moment when their striving, their representational doubt, happily fell short of the spotlight, and some other players could take their place on the field after half-time. In the episode of the statues, a representation that one race was in control of the country finally passed from the British to the Malays. Recall that it had been impressed on the Malays that removing the monuments was 'in

Statues  37 the interest of making a favourable impression on … visiting Afro-Asians’.14 The representation, in this case, was that one faith or race, as first among equals, spoke for the entire nation's culture. The Malays hesitated for at least six years after independence to identify themselves as a people with such an outlook. This suggested that the certainty required by a certain representation could come and go, or be largely absent and then simply turn up. That is the case that Nietzsche makes – patriotism is ‘palpitations, or floods’ and ‘always a regression into old loves and narrownesses’15. The statues remaining for six years beyond their use-by date was a representation of an ‘old love’ of British tutelage standing for Malay nationalism. This was a politics of place holding. Nationalistic representation in a colonial context gave an individual an innate sense of certainty in salvation. It was expressed as rhetoric of originalism or political pre-eminence. This drove its exponents to claim more body space than was strictly needed, as if the buffer anticipated an increase of Dasein interactions, needing and being needed. Heidegger gestured toward the continued cultural prevalence of Christianity accomplishing things in the world.16 That is, adherence to Christianity may be less important to colonial certainty than a confidence that political outcomes conformable to Christian affiliation will occur. The statues saga in Kuala Lumpur in 1963 was not a Christian moment, but a Muslim one. The originalism of the Malay government stands almost completely lacking in its representation, as was constancy to a single representation. It was a pantheistic moment. The Christian Civilisation Gods retreated to a tropical garden on the grounds of the national museum where they still stand. Tomcats yawn and scrap in the heavy shade under Swettenham’s quite specific gaze. A high hum emanates from the museum canteen, as the mango lassis are prepared. But for all the greenery, it is almost suburban. What would Heidegger draw from the story of the statues of Kuala Lumpur? The statues generated a moment of farce – a people who did not know what to be certain about. The bemused British sidelined themselves from their old colony and then gave non-binding advice that was followed by the independent Malays anyway. You could not make that stuff up. In effect, the Americans reported that the Malays had a hurricane lamp on the veranda but it was not drawing moths. Yet the Malays suggested that through their inaction, then action, a bronze effigy was not necessary to certainty. A claim to originality not spiked by difference had to be an aberration because it disturbed colonialism’s post-colonial ambitions. By being not so different from the British yet having a representative strategy that favoured no single race, the Malays downplayed the originalism strongly expected by the Americans. In the case of the Malays, this position was only transitory but it was authentic. What happens when Heidegger is placed among the statues? What does it mean if certainty does not need to be represented? In the game of decolonisation, an occupation could be achieved not only by filling space,

38 Statues from pithead to railhead, and claiming authority from symbol or leader. Symbolically vacate it and leave the absence of representation open to interpretation that more than one people have a place. The British never took that path. They were compelled to expand the prerogative of jurisdiction, the economy of occupying progress, and its virtuous symbols. There is no need to re-evaluate their rule or challenge what they were certain about. As Sartre and Nietzsche would have it, let their representation speak for itself. The need to project heroism and the cossetting love it produces was not unique to the British. They did it best though. Do not pursue the worlds behind the representation when the compulsion to memorialise certainty gives you a sufficient abstract to know that it covers doubt, springs from it. The British remnants prevailing in corners of Malaysia judged that it was better to hide their nostalgia over their failing representations than have them be used as a prop for future abuse recalling their exploitative control. When they recognised that the Malays and their traditionalist faith were central to Malaysia's national future, they had to be accepted as an imperfect whole or offence would be taken, and conditions for uncertainty would be created. Nietzsche suggested that an enlightened class, tiring of the endless political experimentation and unfortunate experience, erect a wall against such instability and to live in a way that is ‘fixed and settled’.17 The trick, Nietzsche claimed, was to declare the new codification of ‘thou shalts’ not a compendium of the constitutional experiences of humans, but a product of a divine revelation.18 The problem of this in a Christian to Muslim decolonisation came not in criminal detention standards being maintained or the common sense of contractual agreements being honoured. The authority of law came from elevating racially driven constitutional settlements to the shrouds of a Christian God. Heidegger would have taken it at this moment, called a certainty, and compared it to no other thing. It can be imagined that this did not always easily obtain the imprimatur of Allah when his people slipped into the seat of government. The moment of the statues could be explained as a misfire or an interior blankness where the latest God, a God new to political power, simply had nothing to say and its followers felt no compulsion to act. The Malays, in their divine moment of vacillation, did not represent the nationalism that they went on to develop with vehemence. It approaches over-compensation. It did not take them very long to invoke a myth of a golden age centred on Malacca as a spiritual home whose ‘characters constitute supernatural beings or great historical personalities’.19 Although the Malays initially opted for non-representation to propagate their idea of certainty about the country, none should over-value the influence of this choice. It did not translate to the electoral recognition of the country’s Chinese population in the years after 1957 although it had seemed truly in prospect under the British in 1948.

Statues  39 The British saw the Malays as their friends after decolonisation as one might see an easily beaten doubles combination in badminton. Such fun to play! The doubt of the Malays about their nationalist objective somewhat endeared them to their old mentors but not enough for them to be advised to deepen their second serve, or mix it up with an awkward drop shot occasionally. The British had nevertheless made it clear how to avoid embarrassment about the past once they had joined a region of independent nations. If you cannot be allowed to forget it then slow broil it in understatement.

Notes 1 Airgram, ‘Dept of State from: Embassy Kuala Lumpur’, [1]. 2 Airgram, ‘Dept of State from: Embassy Kuala Lumpur’, [5]. 3 Airgram, ‘Dept of State from: Embassy Kuala Lumpur’, [4]. 4 Airgram, ‘Dept of State from: Embassy Kuala Lumpur’, [4]. 5 Airgram, ‘Dept of State from: Embassy Kuala Lumpur’, [4]. 6 Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader, 121. 7 Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader, 121. 8 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 25. 9 Birmingham, ‘A Deceptive God of Dazzling Whiteness’, 113. 10 Heidegger, Being and Truth, 6. 11 Golomb, Santaniello and Lehrer, Nietzsche and Depth Psychology, 101. 12 Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment, 1. 13 Airgram, ‘Dept of State from: Embassy Kuala Lumpur’, [2]. 14 Airgram, ‘Dept of State from: Embassy Kuala Lumpur’, [5]. 15 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 171. 16 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 10. 17 Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader, 123. 18 Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader, 123. 19 Omar, Myths of the Malay Ruling Class, 27.

Bibliography Birmingham, Peg. (2008) ‘A Deceptive God of Dazzling Whiteness,’ New Centennial Review 8(3): 107-117. Golomb, Jacob, Santaniello, Weaver and Lehrer, Ronald. (eds) Nietzsche and Depth Psychology (New York: SUNY Press, 1999). Heidegger. Letter on Humanism (Frankfurt: Verlag, 1947). Heidegger. The End of Philosophy trans. Joan Stambaugh (London: Souvenir Press, 1973). Heidegger. Being and Truth trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 2010). Nietzsche. A Nietzsche Reader trans R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1977). Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003). Omar, Sharifah Maznah Syed. Myths of the Malay Ruling Class (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1993). Wrathall, Mark. Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

40 Statues

Archival Singapore National Archive A111/NAB768, ‘Department of State Airgram to Dept of State from: Embassy Kuala Lumpur,’ No. 253 (18 December 1963).

4 Judging Occupied Streets, Hong Kong (2014–2018)

An obscure legal case concerned a man who was mistakenly arrested as a protester while eating a piece of cake on the site of an ‘Occupy’ protest in Hong Kong in 2014. Practically no one has heard about this person, and if they have, he would be thought inconsequential. But Mr Lou was someone in the scheme of things. Lou knew that validity in the sense of Heidegger was revealed by cut and thrust, or ‘taking a stand on what it means to exist’ as one Heidegger enthusiast put it.1 Lou took no part in the heroism media. He cared nothing for its relentless veneration of seeming over being or the David versus Goliath trope. He empathized with the students as the next generation. He represented Hong Kong’s troubles by lying for two weeks in one of those gleaming, cream-tiled remand cells of Shamshui Po. When he lay down, he gazed up at a stencilled message on the ceiling advising him that Crimestoppers would reward him for anonymous information. He had no information, and he had no guilt or accomplices. He was there for no lawful reason. Lou’s striving, and its quality, was not to do with being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He knew there was nothing to help that. His subsisting patiently, returning for justice, and receiving it, confirmed the fitness of his being-in-the-world and that a homeless man could test the world’s fitness, too. An imbalance had occurred. When asked, he had jumped for an unjust, inauthentic stimulus. He waited with the right amount of insistence for its unconcealment. He knew the contingent truth that he had been dealt with too severely. Ideas regarded as constant in a community receive special investigation in post-colonial protest occupation. When essaying on the individual in history, Hofstadter referred to a search for ‘the criterion of meaningfulness and validity of what is realised and unrealised’.2 Heidegger’s concern in his later writings for certainty equated to a desire for salvation in a world of contested certainty. This desire included insurgent colonial contexts where there was vying for freedom from answerability to its imposition. Perforce, the idea of certainty as the ground of internal validity

42  Judging Occupied Streets cannot be exclusive to the bandit terrorist, the colonial secretary, or the non-conformist vicar who believes human rights are real. Each tests the fitness of the other to hold validity. One needs reason these days for certainty from somewhere other than the state, its falsifications and distortions, or their representation in its hyena media. This means finding little victories independently, gathering around them, and cheering like we are on a public holiday because of them. Lou was charged as a protester. But he was more like a hapless extra in a film that had moved location and left him behind. He sought validity, in the arrest and trial process, as everyone in his situation would, but he had placed no hope for its realisation in acts of protest. If you have an interest in justice, the story of Lou demands attention because it appears to be about the punishment of a person’s being-in-the-world when it is regarded as inconvenient. In Hofstadter’s concern for the ‘striving interplay’3 of a human and their world, the protester does and undergoes doing-to. Their world, including the media, police, and judges, realise the reconciliation of personal achievements and failures are not entirely of anyone's making. But this does not prevent their urge to doing-to. The Dasein space simultaneously pulls individuals toward validity and pushes them collectively toward a shared conception of it too. This seems to hold particularly true when one considers the adjudication of protest or the treatment of an itinerant like Lou. The hope of salvation, the endpoint of truth, becomes narrowed by legal judgment, or whatever passes for it in the deathly jurisprudential Nirvana of an old colony. Is salvation on the side of peaceful, lawful protest? Is grace obtained by an admiring reading of judicial prerogative to punish those who protest in a manner otherwise? Nietzsche rejected moral invocation of sincerity and solemnity such as the kind judges use. Everyone can see the judge as an architect of an unequal power relation who maintains that everyone is equal before the law. Judges hold a specious morality. Once one holds no hope in salvation, other than moving beyond humanity, the pronouncements of protestor damnation from the post-colonial Bench must, therefore, be thought of as judiciary talk. This frames a legal monologue as an act – a deadly serious speech, to be sure, but seen properly as a pantomime that wants to scare a transgressor into obedience and on to a straight path to prescribed certainty, or ‘approved salvation’. With a realistic glint, Brabazon observed: ‘law is not inherently legitimate, as it is intended to be seen’4. The accepted portrayal of law is that it is separate from political processes, and holds concern for proportionality, balance, and equity. Law is girded by what are uncommon values in venal politics. Law intimates that it holds 'the highest truth' and has 'the character of the certainty of salvation', if Heidegger is deployed as he should be.5 The judiciary is pronounced to hold unconditional beliefs. It is practised in denying exceptions. Judges are important people whom everyone says

Judging Occupied Streets  43 are neutral. In such a light, judiciary talk requires a lot of careful contradicting if you are an occupying protester seeking exoneration from a charge of disobedience. Or, you can just send in Nietzsche under the cover of night like a battalion of crack paratroopers. Yet it is important to find out what standing judiciary talk should be accorded before pronouncing it humbug and dusting one’s hands of it as another false morality. Once we hear the opening strains of judiciary talk, the legitimacy of law is no longer a sovereign full stop. Its failure to use a semi-colon or a forward slash appears questionable. Any kind of decision that keeps categories open is foreclosed by using factual speciousness to save someone not present at the judgment. Judiciary talk controls public supposition of salvation by prescribing acceptable civic behaviour and punishing all else. That’s where the contest lays. The judiciary tends to imagine itself as uncommonly human but bound by unspeakably broader concerns. This attitude makes it a good restraining influence on a Dasein space, which if existing at all, presumes too much unreflective individual freedom, too much hot-blooded non-conformity. Judiciary talk looks the other way in moments of purposeful omission and, gleefully manipulates what was, under a carapace of the concealed and the folly of its open and forensic examination. Such activities are characterised as fact-finding. Back to Mr Lou. In the case in question here, Lou was a homeless soul eating a piece of cake in the vicinity of the Argyle St ‘Occupy’ protest area, Mong Kok in 2014.6 He was approached by police, who, in the company of bailiffs, acted according to a court order to clear the site's last remnants of resistance. The street had to be made ready for its return to normal use as a minibus route. Lou declined to leave the area when requested. Understand that Hong Kong sponge cakes look a lot better than they taste. They should be eaten sooner rather than later, if at all. Lou's testiness no doubt had other reasons. Even without a home, he considered this was his neighbourhood. He did not ‘Occupy’, and certainly not at that moment. Although sympathetic to the aims of the protests, he was an unemployed vagrant occupied by his cake. Lou was nevertheless arrested and charged with criminal contempt and sentenced to an astonishing term of four months in prison. He spent thirteen days incarcerated before the Hong Kong Court of Appeal ruled the sentence to be excessive and freed him without condition. The ‘demand for certainty’ seen by Heidegger was something fundamental; it was ‘absolved from the very beginning’ from ‘a relation to something else’.7 Whether individuals hold certainty, or will themselves to believe that they have it, is the difference between knowledge and selfdeception. When the prosecutor in Lou’s case went to court seeking continuation of a four-month sentence handed out for eating cake in the street, it could only be self-deception about the possession of truth. This insistence was the dubious phenomenon of playing out a role for the notional good of the state, or shareholders of a firm. It carries in it a belief

44  Judging Occupied Streets that making a living is not chosen or that the system needs someone to be playing the bastard role, or soil his or her hands. By highlighting the relation of Lou’s unjust sentence to comparatively lenient ones for more egregious loitering, the process of judicial review attempted to re-absolve judicial pronouncement with certainty. It cannot do it without a trace or memory of the misstep, as would be its preference. Justice is expressed as a relation to injustice, not something decided incorrectly the first time. Nevertheless, the representation of law, when on appeal, cannot return to Heideggerian certainty in its primacy. Lou’s release from jail became possible after a judicial review was conducted of other sentences handed down to individuals who had been charged with the same offence in the context of the Occupy demonstrations. Proportionality only becomes a key part of judiciary talk at its higher levels where scrutiny of legal salvation (a.k.a. the disinterest of judgement) must be more real (or at least believed to be more likely). In the judicial review, it was found that Lou ‘was not an organiser, yet he was effectively sentenced as one’ and ‘the next most serious offender was met with a much lighter penalty’.8 The colonial legacy of legal intelligibility on display in Lou’s case had not lain down to die. Constancy or demonstration of certainty was thought by Heidegger to ‘rest within itself’.9 Ritualised constancy can be a wrong continued as if it was right, as Nietzsche would have it. Or it can be a well-fed, walled-off, and inauthentic internality, which awaits correction by a jolt of history, as per Heidegger. Lifting the scales from an individual's eyes can be enough for the world to change, if many share the injustice and the contexts mount up and the truth becomes sayable. In the judicial review of Lou’s case, counsel for the prosecutor showed up to the court to argue, unreflectively, that the sentence could not be regarded as excessive. When pressed by the judge on why there should be parity in the treatment of those in contempt, the prosecutor, on the judge's account, could give ‘no good reply’ perhaps as if the broad injustice done to Lou served some unmentionable public purpose.10 Judiciary talk is solemn truth fraught by an occasional mistake remedied by a compulsion to do justice, and that is all, as if it is running an extra lap of the running track. That's how the judicial review of the Lou case appeared. In this episode, the role of the prosecutor should not be seen as surprising or egregious. One of 125 prosecutors in the Department of Public Prosecution, this prosecutor was no more than a cog within a larger one following the Secretary for Justice’s instruction to go hard in the sentencing of Occupy protesters. The government’s quality of automatic repression favouring one size of punishment fitting all exemplifies a group of rebels deemed not to need or be worthy of justice. What about the hard-core odds and ends refusing to give up on Occupy who Lou was swept up in? Hanging out in the street after a court has ordered it cleared was hardly the crime of the century. For those still

Judging Occupied Streets  45 protesting, to give up on Occupy would be to relent to the government and its policies. Defiance, interjection, occupation, and the future-feeling they are directed toward, reminds us of Garvey’s comment that ‘…displaying control over oneself invites others … to control them too, and so temperance is a personal virtue with political implications…’11 Lou was not unrelenting. He was not relenting either. He was removed although he thought he was already removed from the protests. Make the threshold to illegality easy to miss. That’s how to deal with protesters. The Hong Kong police used the charge of ‘common injury to the public’ against demonstrators in a 2018 trial on the 2014 so-called ‘Umbrella Movement’ protests.12 No one knows if this refers to anything more than the inconvenience of shop owners or taxi drivers. It is no doubt an indiscriminate criminal damage charge boasting more by-catch than hardened offenders. Judiciary talk narrates the charge as if everyone is clear what it is. The media never calls that bluff. It is obsessed with getting answers to questions in the narrowest bandwidth. Words that sound concise, but which have mysterious content, hold no interest to the mosquito media. It eyes juicier veins. The same goes for an alchemistic, mediocre determination of reasonableness. Such words are, however, important among the ranks of law enforcers and judiciary talkers. A selective reading of facts can give intelligibility to such ambiguity so that the media can finally take the time to understand and pitch back into the world. In 2018, a right of peaceful protest was opposed by charges of 'common injury of the public' and 'unlawful incitement to cause public nuisance'. Both go to the question of what is reasonable. ‘Idle talk’, Heidegger reminded us in Being and Time, is something ‘which everyone can snatch up, [as it] not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding but develops an indifferent intelligibility’.13 If judiciary talk is not an outlet for solemn truth tempered by doubt, then is it akin to ‘idle talk’ a.k.a. journalism? Judiciary talk shares journalism’s deep commitment to simplicity. Words about criminal justice are a case in point. The solemn intonation and the intention to affect a fate are what is easily ‘snatched’ from judiciary talk. It speaks in the still and stern manner of a colonial forefather. A confection such as ‘the common injury to the public’ can become a real and serious crime. The mother of such crimes as ‘common injury’, judiciary talk aspires ‘to the permanence of that which can never be doubted’ as Heidegger framed certainty.14 The Malays and Chinese of Southeast Asia had their aristocracies primed to supply trainees to Oxford and Cambridge to soak up the British legal intelligibility. In time, from it, they would derive their solemnity, their timbres of judgment, and their post-colonial mimicry of judiciary talk. But is it merely journalism with an option to incarcerate? Is judiciary talk a cultivar of idle talk, and carrying out a weaponised enterprise? If so, Heidegger could open a way to see protest as self-possession. Judiciary talk uses no easy slogans. It makes its slogans

46  Judging Occupied Streets unimpeachable. Its speakers will not be distracted from what’s relevant. By saying that it will not suffer a wrong to be without a consequence, an idea about judicial validity comes into view. Speakers of judiciary talk survey their slogan options carefully to pronounce that the one chosen is the only one to apply. It forces protesters to establish that their validity comes legitimately from someplace else. Idle words and phrases promise seemingly logical shortcuts to avoid conflict, too. Although hopeless at politics, Heidegger could be seen as making a political point by alluding to the dangers of idle talk. He would thus speak to a protester: to adopt idle talk, or give it acknowledgement, would make you stray from your anticipated goal. Once the judiciary begins to process you reasonably, or the media declares you ‘embattled’ or ‘valiant’, the emancipatory narrative has been put safely into a box as if you were required to scream from the top of your lungs for eternity to satisfy their tests for your sincerity. When Leung Kwok Heung was elected to Hong Kong's Legislative Council he took his oath of office in 2017 carrying an open yellow umbrella. This symbol of defiance dated from the 2014 Occupy protests when such umbrellas protected protesters from water cannon and pepper spray. The holding of an umbrella was ruled in Court to have invalidated his oath: the holding of an umbrella, in particular with it opened, in the oathtaking ceremony simply does not accord in any reasonable way with the importance and seriousness of the taking of an oath as the ceremony's only purpose.15 The Old School KMT nihilism of going to a legislative investiture with a yellow umbrella is plain to see. It is an act that foresees judiciary talk along with its conditions to certainty, its joyless demands of unreflective loyalty, but continues with the plan anyway. It is a protest, a rejection of judiciary talk, before a curial mouth can open ex tempore. The oath taking failed the solemnity and sincerity test required in the affirmation of Hong Kong's constitutional law requiring solicitude to Mother China. This performative nihilism stood in the face of Chinese communist constancy. The judge in the Leung case did not have to act as a post-colonial agent by affirming that the oath taking was appropriate because Hong Kong is not post-colonial after returning to China in 1997. This also meant that His Honour did not have to explicitly say that a leader of an anti-Beijing protest who revives that protest in the oath ceremony in Hong Kong could proclaim a free speech right under the local constitution. That's precluded by Beijing's final say. This point was reinforced in 2020 by the introduction of a national security crackdown in the territory. The sincerity in question in Leung's case was not to do with the oathtaker's anti-Beijing stance. No one could hold such a position and sincerely seek to be a part of the Hong Kong legislature. Such an intention of joining

Judging Occupied Streets  47 a club to make that club useless or derided cannot be allowed, in the terms of Heidegger, to cast doubt on representing, even if 'representing is a kind of doubting'.16 Hence, a political intervention can, at least for a short time, stiffen up a representation, and expel the thought of public doubt. The Leung case spells out almost nothing of its political context. It relies heavily on the political orientation of its audience to fill in the blanks. At the same time, it orbits at a distance far enough away to the reason for the decision-maker to keep their sympathies invisible. Seeming indifference makes a particularly judicial appearance here because the absence of bias stands in for the single-minded sincerity associated with salvation. These facts could be the same as any facts passing along in a curial parade requiring no more than a general summary. Staying at arm’s length in this way is important because the outcome of the case had been politically pre-determined and judicially internalised. The utter fiction that this was not the case was only eclipsed by Hong Kong’s child-like belief in the rule of law. In that manner, an explicit ruling on why the yellow umbrella was insincere in the context of investiture would have put a call on the political sympathies of the judge. The legal would appear as a subset of the political – something unthinkable regardless of whether negative or positive. Sympathies and the risk of their candid display are unjudicial so their banishment perfectly fits the contrivance of the political to permit the easily understood finality of judiciary talk or simply ask no more of the judicial sputnik than to maintain geostationary awe of the blue planet below. The judiciary prevailed after the events of 2014. Four years after the Occupy movement, in 2018, protestors in Hong Kong endured a flush of oratory from Poon JA as one of the final cases was wrapped up: it is axiomatic that in Hong Kong where the rule of law reigns, the due administration of justice can in no way be interfered with. Those who strike at it strike at the very foundations of our society.17 This was to make clear that protesters couldn’t ignore the courts or the bailiffs tasked with clearing the streets once the protest had ebbed. The judge’s statement could be an example of idle talk, in the dialect of weaponised judiciary talk, as it is easily ‘snatched up’ and it ‘divests us of … understanding’.18 The use of the word ‘justice’ is problematic in this context. How exactly does clearing the streets of barricades and protesters because of complaints from a gaggle of grumpy taxi and minibus drivers relate exactly to ‘the administration of justice’? The absolute representation of the administration of justice, a refusal to explain, indicates a one-way street similar to the Dasein-trashing absolutism in Margaret Thatcher's resolution 'we do not talk to terrorists'. George W. Bush also said 'that you can't talk to terrorists' and that you 'must bring them to justice'.19

48  Judging Occupied Streets The representation of Poon JA of the law is a force that cannot be resisted; a force so certain of itself that it admits no relativity or exception. Counter-argument and judicial review nevertheless remain open to the innocent after the service of law in a claim to uninterrupted constancy, their right to the street, or a piece of cake. Hong Kong people are quarrelsome on this point. Why they say they protest is not the same as why they protest. This silence as to real intent enables them to hold an invitation-only séance for their Kuomintang ancestor ghosts. Questioning their purpose, their bona fides for the side championing democracy, quickly hushes them up when they start banging saucepans about the house. More on this will appear in the last chapter of the book. Judiciary talk must be back-chatted at its most serious moment to ridicule it. A homeless man eating a piece of cake struck at the foundations of society by not making himself instantly scarce when told to move along. For the rule of law to take itself so seriously, it must sound, no matter how trivial the circumstances, like it's imposing a just penalty or remedying the gravest injustice. The deep sound must express the law urge as something unrelated to politics and reduced to an authority to change an individual's destiny. The law's lack of control over its tone is due to every case of its intent being obstructed needing to sound like a life and death matter. It is not in politics, it contends. It is not in that risible game of negotiation. Giving and following lawful instruction is how the world stays true. There is no upper register in the sound of judiciary talk. It is not felt by its speakers to be a failure. If you want to walk among the shrill, go on to Twitter. Nor is the threat of violence behind the administration of justice anything but serious. The hanging judge tone, to inspire awe, must be used sparingly to have the desired effect. Unfortunately, this plays no part in judicial training. The deep tone becomes instinctive and its dry runs mildly addictive. Judiciary talk must distinguish a protest organiser from a homeless man eating a piece of cake in the wrong time and place. The intonation of justice must modulate upwards, or else it serves only to reveal the indifferent politics of China's domination extending quietly into the Hong Kong judiciary to extinguish its claim to a measure of sensitivity or independence. The battle, in symbol and thrust, has been lost. The risk of judiciary talk becoming risible, demounted forcibly from its fine stallion, decreases day-by-day. An inference of a metaphysical positioning does not make Heidegger less useful than Nietzsche in describing a politics of history, or in the case here, the post-colonial state's truculent failure to bow down and act chastened to the masses. Heidegger just wants to talk about who means business more. He would do it without comparing the righteous souls of officialdom to others such as protesters. Make note of the singularity of the Hegelian fountainhead and the particular version of ‘us’ it invokes in Heidegger. If truth is the indispensable quality of a valid judgement upheld by courts and governments, then it can nevertheless be made to wobble

Judging Occupied Streets  49 with doubt by a man eating cake in a street of Mong Kok. He was arrested for no good reason, even if the doubt was named, ‘the course of justice’. Mr Lou's story of knee-jerk punishment discloses that judiciary talk is under Heidegger’s categories a solemn truth tempered by doubt in the name of justice. It is not merely a franchise of idle talk despite it using a simpleton tone on occasion in the manner of journalism. Nietzsche would cover his ears in protest about such recognition. Yet, judiciary talk is a morality ignoring the political expectation of its government paymasters to plead its independent authenticity. The colonial half-life of invalid judgments continues to plague us but it holds the hope of an accidental truth veering us in a new direction. The direction of Lou. Without Lou and his like, the invalidity of law per se becomes the problem, not invalidity carrying on because it is believed to be valid. A quality of ‘closedness’ of law mimics the government’s position without referring to it. This will have a very short shelf life in Hong Kong. There are problems with judiciary talk's insistence on bowing down before the will to power and its connotation of early death and suffering. Once police actions are seen as the curtain raiser for judicial legitimacy, defending the columns and precincts of public safety under this theory reaches a status of unquestionable moral authority. The opposing modes of futurefeeling within the ever-communal Dasein do not so much clash as become polarised. Those who venture an encounter become mutually disgruntled and unreachable to each other. The protesters accepted a governmental politics of corporately obstructed democracy in a manner typical of their KMT forebears. They cannot set themselves apart from government morality because they share its assumptions about who politics should give benefit to. They take their chances in a lottery that they may, one day, be among the winners. That is entrepreneurialism. That is optimism. A community as inward-looking as Hong Kong refuge is taken by individuals practising their seeming in social media, and its signature message for everyone to consume but not get fat. This devotion to seeming, and the tiffs it produces, are not unique to Hong Kong. Everywhere one looks Dasein is precluded by the necessity of one to misrepresent another as trespassing on something held to be holy. Being is about breaking through constraint to reveal authenticity from the experiences of each other. You may recall in the previous chapter Heidegger’s concern for ‘what is represented in the certain representation’.20 For a representation to be certain, in the colonial or post-colonial world, it must possess what Heidegger calls ‘constancy’.21 We noted how a Malay wobble, over taking down old statues raised ‘the inconstancy of the wavering common to all representational thinking as long as it doubts’22. But this could equally be read as a purposeful non-representation arising from doubt in a single race’s domination of young Malaysia i.e. a moment of goodness in representative doubt occurred or Lou’s release was caused by a rule application accidental to the course of invalidity.

50  Judging Occupied Streets Persevering with invalidity, or inauthenticity, until a historical moment of revelation, could be a useful way to converge Heidegger and Nietzsche. In the case of the statues, Malay deference to a revised British certainty toward a validity not based on colonial hubris took a while to 'kick in', if you will. In the matter of the 2019 Hong Kong protests, a government misstep in dealing with fugitive offenders saw it move from uncertainty to invalidity via the public response. Its invalidity has since deepened. New public security measures have been imposed in the unquestionable names of safety and reasonableness. Participating in or indifference to wilful damage of public property saw protesters slip from validity to invalidity. Both have a walled-off Dasein space now and await a fresh moment of unconcealment. Post-colonial judiciary talk in the wake of a CBD occupation comports itself as the most moral, the most truthful, and sincere of judgements. When used in a legal context, the middle 'e' is dropped out of 'judgement' as proof of its severity in intent. Judgment is scary. The refusal of legal judgment to share its political context is its animating magic. The speakers and writers of judiciary talk cannot conceive of its invalidity. Confining facts to a legal purpose is not conceived as the most political act imaginable. I.e. judiciary talk is a representation without a doubt. It is not born in doubt. It never implies it or compares itself to doubt unless forced to do so. It usually acts as an important brace for the state as if it, too, has no doubt. What, then, if a legal case is appealed and judges have to change their minds? Then it becomes justice, proof of something good – a redress for inconsistency, a failure to treat like, alike, perhaps, but not evidence of doubt in the right to judge. Those authorities following indifferent intelligibility, judges among them, do not ask for trust. They assume it, and, working inside its cramped confines, leaf through their liturgy of reasonableness until every objection to incarcerated violence has been cleared away. That occasionally the legal intelligibility fails and is subsequently put right, fuels an undeserved belief in the system through the power of self-correction briefly pointing to the invalid that enables hope. Most counted Hong Kong with Singapore and Malaysia as the old colonies without the backbone to rebel. Such places only ever had crumbs from the big table to argue about and had grown used to it. In a confrontation of enemies in a post-colonial context, the rowdies of civil society in Hong Kong can only see the government as ruling through ritualised consultation. When I lived there 2008-2010, it had seemed that, as long as Financial Secretary John Tsang decided who got what, and presided over the purse strings like an indulging uncle, then Hong Kong could consider itself free and governed by occasional paternal gestures of concern from its local government. The current government’s insistence on its ‘certain representation’ and its judicial reinforcement are clear for all to see and enter the realm of the highly problematic.23

Judging Occupied Streets  51 When Nietzsche observed that we need all that is tyrannical, arbitrary, and irrational in law to develop ‘discipline’, ‘ruthless curiosity’ and ‘subtle flexibility’24 he had in mind those who practice courtly rule and ecclesiastical education, not hapless bystanders or those committed to subversion. Whether the case of Mr Lou comes to inform the discipline of Hong Kong protest can be doubted. Nevertheless, there is no point in principle why a protester cannot harness the ‘rigorous and grandiose stupidity’ of the law to receive civic education in how its effect might be mitigated.25 At the least, it will lead to a train-spotting culture in Hong Kong to identify the ‘closedness’ of judicial interpretation. Affected by his treatment in 2014, Lou sharpened his protest style by plastering posters about police brutality outside the Mong Kok police station in 2019. The judicial and constitutional reaction to widespread and unruly protests such as Hong Kong as seen in 2019 suggests that approved salvation for the misinformed or formalistic is ‘a thing’. I.e. that a pervasive quality of state-enforced brokenness now prevails in the protest movement making lawful protest such a narrow bandwidth that no true protestor could be drawn to it. Coming to mind is Winston Smith's retirement in Orwell's 1984 to a ramshackle suburban café where he sat, broken, and drank oily gin. Also coming to mind is a CIA report on the mood of the Southern Provinces of China in 1965. A surprisingly intellectual report, it was at pains to distinguish between ‘dissidence’ which was possible and ‘resistance’ which was not26. ‘Dissidence was not declining’ said the report ‘it was increasingly translating into apathy and resignation’.27 It also noted that ‘oblique dissent’ including “ordinary stubbornness, intellectual and administrative ‘resistance’, individual soul searching, dissatisfaction, disaffection, rationalisation and alienation”.28 Such dissidence was not aimed squarely at the regime or its agents and ‘may limit or encourage suppressed dissidence without pointing toward overt resistance’29. The CIA report was as pertinent to Hong Kong in 2020 as it was pre-Cultural Revolution China. After a sustained crackdown, the discontent of people appears in muffled symptoms. The push of protest and the pushback in civil pacification helps form inner validities and pursuit of a conformable collective validity. Uniform state oppression kills the Dasein scene, because there is no testy adjustment required by a political elite. No recalibration of an inner plan to realise validity occurs. All that exists is a world of banning, strong-arming, correct thought and propaganda in which individuals are smouldering dissidents reduced to taking orders and drinking that oily gin. Next, the occupation of Hong Kong by Japan during the Second World War falls under a beady Heideggerian stare.

Notes 1 Rothman, ‘Is Heidegger Contaminated by Nazism?’ 2 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 236.

52  Judging Occupied Streets 3 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 238. 4 Brabazon, ‘Occupying Legality’, 31. 5 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 24. 6 Lou Tit Man v Secretary for Justice [2018] HKCA 1004 (Pang JA). 7 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 26. 8 Lou Tit Man, [15]. 9 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 26. 10 [2018] HKCA 1004, [10]. 11 Garver, ‘Charmides and the Virtue of Opacity, 473. 12 BBC News, “Hong Kong Activists on Trial for Pioneering the ‘Umbrella’ Protests”. 13 Heidegger, Being and Time, 158. 14 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 29. 15 Secretary for Justice v Leung Kwok Heung CACV 201/2017, [125] (Poon JA). 16 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 29. 17 Secretary for Justice v Wong Ho Ming [2018] HKCA 173, [78] (Poon JA). 18 Heidegger, Being and Time, 158. 19 Toros, ‘We Don’t Negotiate with Terrorists’, 407. 20 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 25. 21 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 25. 22 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 25. 23 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 25. 24 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 111. 25 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 112. 26 CIA-RDP79S01008A000100060002-5, ‘Assessment of 1965 Dissidence Levels’, 1. 27 CIA-RDP79S01008A000100060002-5, ‘Assessment of 1965 Dissidence Levels’, 1. 28 CIA-RDP79S01008A000100060002-5, ‘Assessment of 1965 Dissidence Levels’, 4. 29 CIA-RDP79S01008A000100060002-5, ‘Assessment of 1965 Dissidence Levels’, 4.

Bibliography Brabazon, Honor (2017) ‘Occupying Legality: The Subversive Use of Law in Latin American Occupation Movements,’ Bulletin of Latin American Research 36(1): 21-35. Garver, Eugene (2018) ‘Charmides and the Virtue of Opacity: An Early Chapter in the History of the Individual,’ Review of Metaphysics 71(3): 469-500. Heidegger. The End of Philosophy trans. Joan Stambaugh (London: Souvenir Press, 1973). Heidegger. Being and Time trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York, 1996). Hofstadter, Albert. ‘The Philosophy in History,’ in Sydney Hook (ed), Philosophy and History (New York: New York University, 1970). Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003). Toros, Harmonie (2008) ‘“We Don’t Negotiate with Terrorists!”: Legitimacy and Complexity on Terrorist Conflicts,’ Security Dialogue 39(4): 407-426.

Judging Occupied Streets  53

Legal Cases Lou Tit Man v Secretary for Justice [2018] HKCA 1004 (Pang JA). Secretary for Justice v Wong Ho Ming [2018] HKCA 173 (Poon JA). Secretary for Justice v Leung Kwok Heung CACV 201/2017, [125] (Poon JA).

Archival Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Digital Reading Room CIA-RDP79S01008A000100060002-5, ‘Assessment of 1965 Dissidence Levels in Five Provinces of Southern China’ (1 April 1966).

Online References New Yorker magazine website: Joshua Rothman, ‘Is Heidegger Contaminated by Nazism?’ (Published: 28 April 2014) Avail at: https://www.newyorker.com/ books/page-turner/is-heidegger-contaminated-by-nazism (Accessed: October 13 2020). BBC News website, ‘Hong Kong Activists on Trial for Pioneering the ‘Umbrella’ Protests’ (Published: 18 November 2018). Avail at: https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-asia-china-46257578 (Accessed: November 22 2019).

5 Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong (1941–1945)

Across my last few books, there remain two gaps in my study of colonial representation in Hong Kong that demand some small remedy here. The first gap is the reception of the KMT in Hong Kong after the end of the Second World War. The British of Hong Kong were usually quite negative toward the KMT when referring to the party in official correspondence in the period between 1946 and 1949. Why this was so needed some explanation. Claims from anti-colonial nationalism were quietly used under a reforming colonial platform, but there can only be a single certainty. Monopolistic capitalism and a preference for dealing with corporate representation structures were policy planks of both the KMT and colonial regimes in Southeast Asia. The first chapter explained that Heidegger took a position that certainty in representation was untouchable from the outset by any reference to relational parties or forces. On this reading, the British, having returned to Hong Kong in September 1945 to occupy, would be expected to question the nationalist bona fides of the KMT. The Nationalists still controlled much of mainland China at that stage. The British wanted to avoid comparing their right to rule Hong Kong with that of the KMT. Its position, backed by U.S. foreign policy, was for the return of the territory to the Chinese motherland when convenient. There are questions of constancy to be asked of KMT sovereignty claims in Hong Kong after 1945. There are bigger ones to be asked of the British, too, but that is not my purpose here. The other gap in my studies is the representation record of the Japanese colonial government, which ruled Hong Kong for three years and eight months from the end of 1941 until 1945 when the British resumed it as their own once again. My question: did Hong Kong provide a far-flung territorial context for a more diffident position on certainty and constancy under Japanese rule than their propaganda suggested? When they talked to the world about 'their Hong Kong', the Japanese officially placed their doubt and uncertainty on show in the way they named their prize, even if not quite intending it. If this was the only honest aspect of their rule, then

Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong  55 at least it was a fundamental one. Fundamental and true to type, I say, in the same ways that the Malayan disorientation that refused to compare rival representative claims to public space, or change course without first weighing up the potential embarrassment of a righteous rebuke. Heidegger contended that ‘to represent something does not just say: to bring something to oneself, but also: to portray something, namely representing meant in the first instance’.1 The first kind of representation suggested that ownership, or speaking for an interest, person or tribe, was a presumption braced by a filigree of supporting laws or recognitions enlivened when the interest was challenged. This representation took to itself jurisdiction. The second kind of representation, the one of portrayal, reminds me of Brabazon’s point about the law intending to be seen.2 In its descriptions wishing to affect, law aspires to the garments of jurisdiction. My contention in this chapter: by seeking to truthfully name Hong Kong 'captured' rather than 'occupied' its Japanese possessors, nevertheless, displayed knowledge of finitude in their dealings with local people to create a possession characterised by getting in while the going was good. A colonial judgment must be more than an accurate name, even if it was designed to refute international categories. It must signify a policy carried out distinct from those categories. Japanese rule rested on giving free passes to its cronies as a means of limiting the Dasein of unaligned Chinese. Colonialism must take origination seriously if it is to be able to assert authenticity. In the case of Hong Kong, a policy of plunder and rapine before the opportunity passed had commenced as a Japanese self-liberation from international categories of ‘conquest’ and ‘occupation’. Yet the known-to-itself temporariness of Japanese Hong Kong sent a message to the world that the Japanese sought individual and collective Dasein spaces that were hobbled by previous associations and surprisingly arbitrary for a colonial power that avowed ‘Asia for the Asians’. My related argument presented in the next chapter on Chinese collaborators in colonial Hong Kong contends that the misfit between name and deed in Japanese Hong Kong structured its relations with locals. The striking individual discrimination and exception to it relied on Japanese historical identification of shared corrupt endeavour to close off the potentials of Dasein in fruitful commerce or property dealings to all but the most solicitous people. The Dasein play of collaborators was not morally wrong for denying Being to non-collaborators. In its fixedness, it lacked openness and tension with the outside world. By lacking a sense of giving or playing or tactility, it was inauthentic or was it? For a colonial occupation to call itself something different (friendly conquest, placeholder regime, strategic capture, or whatever) it must live up to its expectation of sincerity. I.e. it must live out a Dasein. I refer to this as the Jeremy Irons supposition. Irons plays a character for entertainment. Yet something that cannot be acted lies beneath the surface of the

56  Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong performance. Even in performance, the individual believes that sincerity matters to themselves, and others. They work their way assuredly through the protocols of revealing others. Success in seeming to be is not at all important to those role-playing in calm sincerity; they have simply found another space where they can be themselves. Frank exchanges in Dasein, in the confidence that you are not hurting or intending to hurt, are everything in the Irons space. A transformative belief in the decency of keeping a promise or the shared bounty of revealing is needed in Dasein. One will see almost immediately that the ad hoc under the aegis of atmospheric domination pretty much sums up most territorial occupations of one place by another; that home invasion and hostage-taking are not enterprises of the sincere or the careful-hearted. Sincere Dasein interactions are exceedingly difficult in a colonial occupation because it is not front facing. Colonialism is an overlay requiring much extra obedience and not in the last instance configured for reciprocity. Hofstadter, it will be recalled, made the extraordinary suggestion that Dasein implies 'some degree of reciprocal fitness' whereby the self goes to work on the world and the world habilitates the self.3 Dasein is an intersection that can only work in colonialism if it’s beneath and above are suspended in a particular case. Perhaps collaborators are such people – put on the putative level of the ruling foreign occupant through shows of preference of the ruler and pulled to earth by the unelevated citizen. Alternatively, any person in authority in an occupation stands above a glass-topped aquarium. They look down on all the pretty fishes and net all the best opportunities for easy plunder. Anyone who is plundered who thinks there is interaction, or negotiation, in the processes of colonialism is self-deluding. Colonialism relies on not everyone knowing that. The temporal dimension of the Dasein space is forward-looking. A master cooper makes barrels in solemn contemplation of the graceful bow of its stave and the tension of its head hoop. For Heidegger, in the 'everydayness' of 'Being-in-the-world' tools offer stability, their being 'ready-to-hand' reminds us of the future.4 The anticipative aspect of Dasein was authenticity. Heidegger noticed it everywhere in the small country towns of southern Germany. The temporal ecstasy of a skilled manual worker, inhabiting a world in which individuals with capability are at ease with themselves, was contrasted by Heidegger with those who fled from Dasein into modes of inauthenticity. This suggests two questions in the realm of imperialism and conquest: 1. If the barrel-maker was an example of the authentic mode of Dasein, did colonialism's racialised recreation of an upper and lower echelon disqualify most people from an opportunity to be addressed by Dasein? i.e. does the geographical 'where' of Dasein prefigure its distribution throughout a community?

Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong  57 2. Is a slave, or an indentured worker, or a transported convict in a colonial setting, a tool of the members of the colonising power? As to question 1, Heideggerians do not trouble themselves over an undiscerning mass leading lives of preconceived patterns and newspaperapproved-of opinions. Transposed to the colonial mass, this is a picture of white Dasein and black inauthenticity. Dasein is a racially cultivated play space. There is apartheid for Being. Alternatively, colonialism makes a dispensation of Being, including its tactility and reciprocity. The question of whether the people were ready for home rule mattered. But whether the recognition of a right to interact and be interacted with, can be indefinitely delayed on no criterion except race, or ethnicity, or religion, etc, mattered more. Question (2) was about whether the usefulness of other humans made them tool-like under colonialism. The spread of technicity under colonialism was not about gleaming machines. A criminalised or racialised 'other' became a ready-to-hand instrument of white Dasein. A striking aspect of colonialism was that other people became the tools of the future-gazing Dasein; the rates of fertility and mortality were closely monitored and not always out of some sort of concern for congregational strength. Heidegger considered that human beings shaped the Dasein of other human beings. They could be closer to a 'ready-to-hand' object than a fellow subject, or as Harman put it, beyond the world of saws and hammers, ‘tool usefulness holds good for all entities, no matter how useful or useless they might be’.5 This entails a squeamish choice between making all beings objects, some objects using others as objects, or an elite subject – whose bailiwick alone is Dasein – using beings as an object, as in, a labourer and their attached spade being sent to dig a canal. The site of philosophy is not the human subject and surrounding objects, but relations between undifferentiated objects in a world in which everything is an object. If this is true, the ontological preference for Dasein as a space holding apart object and subject, but uniting it too, must be read down, as lawyers like to say. Fighting this anthropocentrism has become a philosophical pre-occupation. How the human-object treats the blue planet-object is now an all-consuming question. So much so that a handful of us are not permitted to waste our lives discussing how, as a matter of history, human-objects subordinated other humanobjects as tools. It is irrelevant to see the lineages of human-objecthood in modern slavery, client state post-colonialism or the toxic asymmetry of nations generally. It will be recalled that the word ‘captured’ in the description of wartime Hong Kong neatly side-stepped any question of de jure sovereignty under international law, or in any other relevant sense, because to capture was neither to conquer nor, specifically, occupy. Colonialism is, to itself, knowingly temporary, and audacious because of it. There is no

58  Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong disincentive for a small group of people to regard themselves as elite subjects, and most others, as objects to be used as tools in the work of drudgery. In this bleak landscape for Dasein, the anticipative ecstasy would be eclipsed by a pervasive uncertainty as to whether colonial improvements would be yours to enjoy. Let us say to completing the runway extension at Kai Tak, or building Hirams Road or the Shinto tower at Mount Cameron offered labour no anticipation. The indeterminacy of a colonial occupation hollowed out the anticipative ecstasy of Dasein. An elite subject maximised a human-object being-at-hand as a tool. Yet a place 'captured' has not necessarily been taken from the grasp of its owner forever, only the pleasure of caring for it in labour. Witness a Reuter’s report that ran under the diffident headline ‘Plan to Keep Hong Kong’6 which reported on a press conference given by a Japanese government spokesman in Tokyo after hostilities in Hong Kong had finished.7 In response to a question as to whether Hong Kong would be eventually returned, foreign affairs spokesman Masayuki Tani said that since Hong Kong’s former status was as a British Crown colony ‘it would be treated as such’.8 Tani meant that the territory had been captured from an enemy as a prize of war. Its defenders and inhabitants bore an unrebuttable presumption of British complicity. This would be consistent with a reading of occupation-era Dasein of an elite subject using human-objects in uncertain acts of monumentalism. Tani said that fighting had only just ceased in the Hong Kong area and he that ‘he would not commit himself any further’.9 Occupation, on such an account, implies (human) object to state (object) relations through abuse of humans as objects of technicity. The Dasein and its measurement through authenticity and inauthenticity were subject to Heidegger's later refinements. These included articulations such as certainty, constancy, and the policy of a real representation. What does the policy of a person, a crowd, a party, or a government administration stand for as a matter of history? Such a question can find an answer that corresponds to both or either of Heidegger's definitions of representation. Self-description of occupation by a new occupier forms a potential source of indiscretion, an open secret, an unintended signal, and with such a designation settled, fresh insight is revealed. A description of human vanity motivating the will to power, such as Nietzsche posed, seems lacking in subtlety, loping Neanderthal-like after Charles Darwin. On Han’s account of the Japanese bureaucratic order in Hong Kong, ‘the Japanese had demonstrated that they were conquerors and ruthless’ and that ‘they had made it known that Hong Kong was to be under military rule.’10 As an occupying power in Hong Kong in 1941, the Japanese were required by the Hague Convention of 1907 to treat property by following its clauses yet their rule manifested in arbitrary treatment in relation not only to enemy but private non-enemy Chinese-owned property. If one refused to collaborate, they confiscated or whisked off for scrap

Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong  59 whatever they wanted. This formed a real politique ignoring their official references to martial 'capture'. Deliberative functional control was a practice of fleecing and reallocating the blended preferences for the easily monetised and the carefully weighted pay-off for gangster loyalty and village policing. It made any truth in the representation by portrayal all but impossible. The instrumental abuse of fellow human beings reinforced the above and below of colonialism. It revealed in their inauthentic scurrying between subject and object and the fixity of humans made into an object. Until sanctification under the aegis of conquest, relations could ease back into employment or vocation rather than acting in machinelike slavery. In the first sense of representation, the Japanese could do little more than represent themselves as devotees of a military requisition in Hong Kong. They did this by using their overlordship to strip out the colony's abandoned ironwork to fuel their war machine, and later, simply garrisoned it cheaply to deny its potential prosperity and use as a foothold to China to the Allies. In the second sense, the representation of a tableau made to be seen, note that the 'Asia for Asians' movement and Japanese leadership of the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere necessitated the physical occupation of old European colonies. Hong Kong was but one example of many such places. The representational truth expressed in the naming of Hong Kong as 'captured', not conquered, was at odds with the larger scheme for Asian freedom from colonial interference. Hong Kong was captured. But its echoes registered discordantly within the new empire rhetoric. What the Japanese occupants of Hong Kong called their possession is an unusually instructive matter. They conducted a compressed and thoroughly belligerent occupation of a few years. The new occupant's dictum was: if we cannot be old and familiar, or concessional without losing authority, our rules will be consistently death delivering. The Japanese were humans who invoked the name of death freely – as if, by provoking the suspected insolence of the world, they could amplify their domination of Dasein. To force yourself to feel nothing for those pronounced as temporary to avoid feeling anything at all rises up as the true measure of colonialism's inequity to its movers and shakers. When an invader does it, they are ignorant of the finitude it forces onto relationships with others and the possibilities of trails through Dasein that are available. They hurry to give context to the perversity of individual judgment, too. The invader is the winner in the present moment or at least until an epochal unconcealment lands them in a Class B war crimes tribunal. The above and the under of colonialism meant that Dasein could not be forward facing, or rich in tangents beyond narrow imperial imagining. Nor could inquisitive intelligence be played forward on a store of sincerity, in a Jeremy Irons supposition, politely atoning the very moment a raw nerve was hit.

60  Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong Conceding the potential clumsiness of translation, 'capture' seems closer to 'occupy' than does 'conquer'. 'Capture' is a step to the side of 'occupying'. One British reference to Governor Rensuke Isogai’s office dating from 1945 translated to ‘The Governor’s Office of the Occupied Territories of Hong Kong’.11 One document relating to registration of a house dated 1942 requires the applicant for registration of ownership of a house to return it to ‘Rensuke Isogai, Governor of the Occupied Territory of Hong Kong.’12 Another official document dated from the same year sets down new rules for the registration of ownership of tenements and claims to be ‘(under the jurisdiction of) the Governor’s Office of Hong Kong and its Occupied Territories’. 13 Shortly after assuming responsibilities as Governor in 1942, General Isogai was quoted in the Japanese-published Hong Kong News as saying that the territory would not be governed ‘in the same category’ as Japan’s other annexed colonial possessions, Korea and Formosa (Taiwan).14 Hong Kong was to be a B-team garrison town for the Army and a source of scrap metal supplies, and a slow bleed in land tax, for the war effort. On this logic, Tokyo had revived General Isogai and made him Governor. He was an old school militarist who had not exactly covered himself in glory in the Manchurian campaigns. He imposed the jackboot of perpetual martial law fringed by civic consultation that could speak only to how an imposed measure was carried out, not whether or not it should be done.15 Wing-Tak Han observed that at the outset the Japanese regarded Hong Kong as ‘the Captured Territory’.16 Indeed, in some Japanese administrative documents after 1942, Hong Kong was designated in Japanese as ‘ 香港、テリトリーを捕獲’ or ‘the Captured Territory of Hong Kong’17. To begin with, there was some consistency in the naming of the colony. One official form relating to the registration of the sale of houses requires the applicant to return the document to 'The House Registration Office of the Office of Governor of the Captured Territory of Hong Kong.'18 Another document relating to registration of an instrument is to be returned to ‘The Law Court of the Office of The Governor of the Captured Territory of Hong Kong.’19 ‘Captured territory’ could suggest some candid unease about Japanese sovereignty. The cat had its claws in a mouse whose heart still beats. 'Captured' was simply factual too. It did not convey the chill or certainty of imperium or dare such a representation. In short, the Japanese, by leaving a space indeterminate, could rule with martial certainty under an indeterminate name. The representation of temporariness, such as it was, could be exorcised by routine severity. Falling back on violence could be perceived as a natural reaction to martial law's infringement. Hong Kong was a place that had been taken and retained by a mighty impulse of military force, about 20,000 men who had to fight to win it much harder than they thought they would. Control of it was a dull matter of belligerent pragmatism left to 5,000 men. This was rooted in no higher authority than Tokyo's

Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong  61 decision that Hong Kong was to be the Army's tightly held ground, not the Navy's South China supply depot. The nomenclature for Hong Kong was reasonably consistent about ‘capture’. But it was not so repetitious as to suggest that other shades of meaning had been entirely banished. The lived and died experience of Japanese rule felt like conquest – for the Japanese were not Heideggerian at all. They were concerned about the finitude of human beings, as one might be concerned with the drill bit getting blunt. Death ending the possibility of relationships with others was not their concern at all. It is unclear from their bureaucratic flourishes if the Japanese were making an administrative distinction between Hong Kong Island, on one hand, and Kowloon and the New Territories, on the other. It would seem strange, however, that the Japanese considered themselves sovereigns of Hong Kong Island and mere occupants of the places on the other side of Victoria Harbour. They held effective military control of both sides (if only up to a point in the bandit-ridden New Territories) and exercised land registration powers in all relevant sectors. The same document has Rensuke Isogai claiming the title of 'Governor of Hong Kong and its Occupied Territories’20. This could connote that the Governor saw other areas as satellites beneath the more strategically significant Hong Kong Island. Possibly. In interpreting Freud, Derrida hit on an idea about the morbidity that an institution such as an archive or a government registry represents.21 Finitude and the reality of approaching death was also a hallmark in Heidegger’s thinking about Dasein but not in the sense of the life or death of a human being. Finitude is located centrally in Dasein and death signals the end of relationships with others and ‘the possibilities of Dasein’.22 The ever-presence of rules – including the replication of ‘old society’ rules to engender credibility and freshly-minted occupier rules that interpret a context they have created – tell us that institutions encode relationships by their means. By giving expectations of dialogue to human interactions, rules limit what may be asked of an institution, no matter how frequent or adept the user, giving it hard edges. The impossibility of intimacy with a colonial institution reminds its users that their Dasein space will see a time when no relationships will be possible, and the most meagre transactions over the information will be null and void in effect. An archive or a property registry is much the same. When a time comes when I can no longer seek support for my theory in documented facts, or when I can't own property, the institution will go on, dealing with my successor, dully and duly feeding off their energy instead. In a freshly minted colonial rule, the brittle character of its legal reach is evident. No resort can be enjoyed in such a time to repetition and reproduction or a bureaucratic holding of a line that it never needed to change, for it is too new itself. It requires that guns or swords, or their

62  Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong potent threat, be never far removed. In a colonial institution, old or new, the endlessness of death is a prompt to earthly action in the sense of the life of a human being using it. Its effect on Being in the sense of Dasein is not the same. It is the end of any relationship with others. The end of potential. Death is not an experience of a tunnel from which you emerge from the other side; finitude is death-awareness but also the end of ability. The rules, especially protocols on identity, and with it civic conformity, recall a discussion pursued at the outset of this text about pre-existing historical limitations on Dasein. The game that was rigged before you stepped into it is no happier a thought than a representation of temporariness made real by martial violence. Both trample on the Dasein of the non-aligned and increase, not calm, the spinning of thrownness. Even if a coloniser could pick a path in Dasein, the prejudice in their interactions would pave their way. The coloniser would offer only a closed mind to any arriving with a good reputation or make Dasein plays intended to enforce, rather than interact. When an enemy was punished, it demonstrated the luck of those who had been put to an exploitative use as an object-tool. Each treatment imported a manipulation of received history to make a fate deserved. For example, in Hong Kong, the Hokkiens were domestic servants for the British who were regularly suspected under criminal law and, on becoming peddlers, were ejected from the territory by the Japanese as 'useless rice buckets'.23 It is not only the inauthentic that bring History pre-emptively into the Dasein game. Dasein-seekers who are superstitious or who never tempt fate or who privilege precedent, cripple themselves, reduce their abilities, by letting History in by a back door. What impinges on the possibilities of Dasein and the quality of interactions with others? An unverified tale said to be salutary, a system of rules to prohibit doing this or that, or a tradition strictly upheld for forgotten reasons. The newly minted Japanese Land Office of Hong Kong sought continuity with the British ways that preceded them. This did not include the missteps including not requiring registration of a mortgage clearance, as well as failing to register houses and the land they stood on. They tried, just like any institution of old, as Derrida put it, to 'assure the possibility of memorisation, of repetition, of reproduction'24. Its pursuit of previous authority by making green ink entries in the old British folios recalled that, in Derrida’s turn of phrase, ‘repetition itself, the logic of repetition, remains … indissociable from death’.25 Its infinity of repetition, its measured interactions confined by rule recognition, brought with them a crippling sense of History to determine who was friend, who was enemy, and how Dasein plays could be intensified or prevented. Where a Heideggerian sees impending death as the motivation for ‘authentic self-projection and historical being’, a follower of Adorno tends toward viewing experience not as preparatory to ‘epic death’ but within the zone

Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong  63 of Dasein as something itself ‘historically conditioned’.26 The naming of a new colony is nearly always an occasion to breach History or declare that the new possession is evermore on a different path. Consistency with British bureaucratic procedure attempted to encourage trust in the new ruler that seemed at odds with new broom colonialism signalled in the naming game. One early Chinese translation of the Japanese possessory epithet for Hong Kong dating from late 1941 was ‘香港占領地’ or ‘Hong Kong Conquered Territory’.27 The word 'conquered' in Chinese translation reflected Cantonese pessimism at the time. Hong Kong was under the heel of Japan but not as an annexed colony and this denied it the symbolic recognitions and reciprocities that go with such a status with the empire. By generally choosing the designation of ‘captured territory’ for Hong Kong, the Japanese chose a label to hold it ambiguously under military law. They chose to possess it, certainly, but not to occupy it in the sense of stepping in to administer the territory with a viable or acceptable responsibility for civil governance. Such ambiguity was not reflected in the land-granting and tax-receiving functions of the Japanese colonial government in Hong Kong, which went ahead at full-steam after mid1942. This was the case unless mere possession of a territory, without a compact of consents and reciprocities inherent in governance, confers the legitimacy of fiscal receipt. An occupant can receive tax revenues from subjects, but not have deep-reaching territorial certainty in the sense implied by Heidegger. In this observation, we have not landed on some frosty moon of Venus but sit conformably within the dictates of International Humanitarian Law. It has long been stipulated that merely achieving a state of occupation confers on the occupying state the right to receipt of taxes from people, even if they are not yet your conquered and formally annexed subjects. The British precedent gave the Japanese an option in the Treaty Ports of might was right even if you were merely a belligerent occupier operating in a sphere of influence. The agents of Japan and the United Kingdom could both justify their position with any claim to sovereignty that seemed to work. This nevertheless carried with it a sense of nervousness characterised on occasion by an over-determination to act in conquest and, in the case of the Japanese especially, frightfully honest indecision about the label of their possessory claim. Let us say a colonial power seizes land from its original owner. Later, it is forced to quit its colony by another belligerent colonising power. Later, the first colonising power returns to their old colony and denies recognition again to its original owner. Does the representational constancy of the first colonial power, and its determination to return, count as a representation of certainty? This is the question raised in Hong Kong in 1946. For Heidegger, there is no topical centre to the ideas of constancy

64  Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong and certainty as authors of representation. Truth is simply adherence to a principle, in this case, an unflinching British sense of ownership. All that matters, is that a representor was not laid low by doubt. It is not surprising that Heidegger could land on representation as an idea yet pay no mind either to the warps and deceits of ideology, or the battle for representational constancy in the colonial world. It is no more perplexing than Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘law-making violence’ remaining exclusively metropolitan in outlook.28 The European theoretical set is not in the habit of deploying ideas that explain things at home but backfire on them abroad. Although they are simply not sorry for the past, they are just clever enough to understand that the optics of that does not serve their new world representation at all well and so a ghostly hologram of sorrow flickers for a few minutes in the background. In the first sense of representation, the British colonial government stood for the Crown collection of transhipment taxes generated by hinterland Chinese trade and stamp duty revenue levied on scarce and valuable land. In the second sense, the colonial government stood for its role as an impartial chairman. It permitted the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Kuomintang (KMT) to remain in Hong Kong without particular legal or political recognition as long as they did not break local law and order protocols. In Resistance in Colonial and Communist China (1950-1963) I rendered this kind of representation into what movie subtitles call ‘indistinct conversation’; the conversationalists are clear to each other but garbled to the observer. The British administration was strongly anti-CCP in Hong Kong from 1949 until 1956 and generally pro-KMT in outlook from 1949 to 1963. The British preference for the KMT gradually emerged in the final years of the civil war (1945 to 1949) just as the political party’s credibility and representative claims declined.

Acknowledgments Dr Guobin Zhu translated all government documents referred to in this chapter, with additional assistance from Dr Rita Cheung in May 2010.

Notes 1 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 45. 2 Brabazon, ‘Occupying Legality’, 31. 3 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 240. 4 Duff, Heidegger and Politics, 41. 5 Harman, Tool-being, 4. 6 ‘Plan to Keep Hong Kong’, Reuters, 12. 7 ‘Plan to Keep Hong Kong’, 12. 8 ‘Plan to Keep Hong Kong’, 12. 9 ‘Plan to Keep Hong Kong’, 12.

Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong  65 0 Han, ‘Bureaucracy and the Japanese Invasion of Hong Kong’, 9. 1 11 HKRS53-3-420, ‘List of Enemy Properties’ (undated 1945). 12 HKRS 53-3-420, ‘Application for Registration of Houses’ (undated 1942). 13 HKRS53-3-420, ‘Governor’s Order No. 30’ (23 July 1942) 1. 14 Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 124. 15 Endacott, Hong Kong Eclipse, 124–125. 16 Han, ‘Bureaucracy and the Japanese’, 9–10. 17 HKRS53-3-420, ‘Application for the Delivery of Another Copy of the Register’. 18 HKRS53-3-420, ‘Application for Registration’. 19 HKRS53-3-420, ‘Application for the Registration of an Instrument’. 20 HKRS53-3-420, ‘Governor’s Order No. 30’, 1. 21 Derrida, Archive Fever, 11-12. 22 Elkholy, Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling, 30. 23 Snow, The Fall of Hong Kong, 97. 24 Derrida, Archive Fever, 11. 25 Derrida, Archive Fever, 11. 26 Finke, ‘Adorno and the Experience of Metaphysics’, 118. 27 Fung, Reluctant Heroes, 135. 28 Osborne, Walter Benjamin: Appropriations, 207.

Bibliography Brabazon, Honor. (2017) ‘Occupying Legality: The Subversive Use of Law in Latin American Occupation Movements,’ Bulletin of Latin American Research 36(1): 21-35. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Duff, Alexander. Heidegger and Politics: The Ontology of Radical Discontent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Elkholy, Sharin. Heidegger and a Metaphysics of Feeling (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). Endacott, G.B. Hong Kong Eclipse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Finke, Stale R.S. (1999) ‘Review Essay: Adorno and the Experience of Metaphysics,’ Philosophy and Social Criticism 25(6): 105–126. Fung, Chi Ming, Reluctant Heroes: Rickshaw Pullers in Hong Kong and Canton, 1874-1954 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005). Han, Wing-tak. ‘Bureaucracy and the Japanese Invasion of Hong Kong,’ in William Newell (ed), Japan in Asia 1942-1945 (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1980). Harman, Graham. Tool-being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002). Heidegger. The End of Philosophy trans. Joan Stambaugh (London: Souvenir Press, 1973). Hofstadter, Albert. ‘The Philosophy in History,’ in Sydney Hook (ed), Philosophy and History (New York: New York University, 1970). Osborne, Peter. (ed) Walter Benjamin: Appropriations, (vol 3) (London: Routledge, 2005). Snow, Philip. The Fall of Hong Kong: Britain, China and the Japanese Occupation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) 97.

66  Representation in “Captured” Japanese Hong Kong

Newspapers Reuters, ‘Plan to Keep Hong Kong,’ The Straits Times (29 December 1941).

Archival Hong Kong Public Records Office (Kwun Tong) HKRS53-3-420, ‘List of Enemy Properties in the Colony of Hong Kong (Japanese Properties)’ (undated 1945). HKRS 53-3-420, Governor’s Office, ‘Application for Registration of Houses’ (undated 1942). HKRS53-3-420, ‘Governor’s Office, Governor’s Order No. 30, An Order Relating to the Ownership of Tenements’ (23 July 1942) 1. HKRS53-3-420, “Application for the Delivery of Another Copy of the Register of the Registration of Houses 1942” (undated 1942). HKRS53-3-420, ‘Application for Registration of the Sale, Purchase and Assignment of Houses 1942’ (undated 1942). HKRS53-3-420, ‘Governor’s Office, Application for the Registration of an Instrument Relating to a House 1942’ (undated 1942). HKRS53-3-420, ‘Governor’s Office, Governor’s Order No. 30, An Order Relating to the Ownership of Tenements’ (23 July 1942).

6 Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators, Hong Kong (1941–1944)

The Japanese had unease as to their sovereign right when they occupied several places in East and Southeast Asia. This uncertainty had a bearing on their treatment of their presumed enemies, as well as their collaborators. A governing policy of affording advantage to one but not another, based on no validity, or only a nervous approximation of it, nevertheless made starvation or being worked to death an ever-present reality for the not-especially-cooperative. The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong was an epochal moment, revealing the British colony as 'uncertainly ours' to the invaders of Nippon. It could only invite the ridiculous opportunism of purporting friends securing fragile sinecures through corrupt commissions, and an expectation of severity among those in Japanese watch lists and jails. ‘Captured’ Hong Kong did not disappoint train spotters on either front. Heidegger suggested that we needed to ‘recognise Being in its truth [was] not merely a question but questionality itself, to recognise in short that Being is time and history’1. The centrality of Being, or Dasein, is a unique feature of Heidegger's philosophy. It is an intermediate place without a place where people and the world make exchanges, touch, and be touched. Time and history filter through Dasein to transpose inside it through a process of unconcealment and re-concealment. When individuals in a community try to impress on the world the contents of their inner plan, the world pushes back to make ‘a valid mode of interaction of self and world’, as Hofstadter put it.2 An inhumane push back from an occupation government – beyond what is needed for a correction toward truth or social assimilation – perversely makes a presumed enemy juggle molten rocks in a manner well beyond ordinary Dasein processes, but possibly within them on some occasions. In the discomfort caused to collaborators by their shunning and revilement in the non-aligned public eye, they too received ample feedback from the world during, and especially after, an occupation. Therefore, there stands an argument that collaborators and the non-aligned had opportunities for Dasein plays within a colonial occupation. An occupation, as a

68  Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators world-not-as-you-know-it, pushed inner validity sought through Dasein interactions within an inch of its meaning. The Jeremy Irons supposition that others played with sincerity, that there was something to learn from them, or that they could be invited to genuineness, took a beating. Not every government, colonial or otherwise, attunes an individual in a Dasein scene toward self-validity. Dasein could occur in an occupation to collaborators and enemies. But the stimulus of a colonial state could not always be truth. Therefore, inner validity must filter what is accepted from the world. One can accept as a formal proposition that the state holds the truth (not merely a truth). Or one can believe that the only important matter is that the truth or untruth of the state can have equal affectivity, as Nietzsche dared to argue. In this contention, Nietzsche’s adoration of the pre-Socratic Greeks becomes visible – particularly the Sophists and their positing of 'semblance' or 'contradiction', human and not divine in origin, next to 'perfect truth', to cast doubt on it.3 Not every generally uncooperative resident of Hong Kong died because of excessive pride during the occupation. Not every collaborator survived despite receiving extra help. A grey zone emerged. Most people entered it in the name of doing what it took on acute occasions to survive. Most people understood that. They reserved loathing for the most egregious, unnecessary, and personally profiteering acts of collaboration. Within the discomfort of the grey zone, people would receive an extra catty of rice for collecting and burning bodies for a day. Working on the cholera ward for a week would earn half a sack of potatoes. Dasein plays emerged even if valid selfhood had to be secondary to doing extraordinary acts to avoid dying. Calling Hong Kong collaborators or survivalist resistance abstainers ‘chrysanthemums’ captures their existential bind in a manner that honours their experience. This flower was the state floral emblem of wartime Japan. The white chrysanthemum is the flower of death for the Southern Chinese to be used only in the context of funerals. That two jurisdictions so geographically close to each other could not agree on what the chrysanthemum represented meant that, on the occasion of China and Hong Kong's occupation by Japan, collaborators accepting the flower as 'Japan' turned their back on its meaning as 'death'. The chrysanthemum became delayed finitude through the choice of an incongruous, discomforting symbol. Being prepared to juggle hot stones, as I put it earlier, in a one-way Dasein scene combining surrender and reward at the tip of the same sword, was the lot of a collaborator. There was no experiment or protest of any kind. It was a preference to see the world in one way rather than another. Others were made to wait, and if they died before getting what they were owed, that was just too bad. The Japanese occupation government denied their land transfer applications until they stopped looking at death in the face dimly and behaved in acceptable solicitude. Until an ordinary, non-aligned citizen conformed, the chrysanthemum could always represent their death.

Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators  69 In the Dasein garden of Hong Kong’s chrysanthemums some found the growing conditions to their liking, others not. The objective or environmental forces promoted or taunted them. They lay flat and rotted or stood and produced wondrous blooms and seed. The variability and sharp turns of every colonial fate contributed to a living, if not in the push and pull of Dasein, then at least an intensive, inauthentic egoism sheltering a light-hearted acceptance that souls like theirs were freely traded. One's number had to come up eventually. Dasein in times of collaboration is not comprised of striving after authenticity or self-validation. There may be a strenuous activity; much energy expended on the enemy's account, but no push back – only the fragile matter of preferential reward. An advantage was denied for no good reason other than someone else wanting it more. The commencement of new colonial power, a new occupation, that is, entails what Heidegger called ‘a decision’ that divides ‘the truth of beings from essential possibilities held in reserve and sanctioned’.4 This concept shows how history prompts the revelation of individuals to themselves. A political setting changes, a contingency or an expectation fails allowing new conditions to emerge that, had they not, would have left a collaborator without a clue of who they were, or more pointedly, how their role determines who they are. The decision, a divider between what is and what could be, simply slides out in the new conditions, leaving beings to know that in their openness to a new choice, they are or are not collaborators, or they were free to fall in with people of similar sympathies. Whether or not a collaborator was capable of Being or Dasein forms the heart of this essay. In characterising Heidegger, Gillespie noted that: ‘History always understands history as an objective causal series of beings or state of being and does not suspect that history is the occurrence of Being itself’.5 Furthermore, History has to see itself as the result of the historical process overall ‘in order to secure its own claim to truth’.6 The decision, or the falling away of a divider, revealing Dasein to beings, was in Hong Kong in December 1941 prompted by the Japanese arriving, European women and children leaving, Europeans and Canadians defending and losing, and surrender by the defenders. Military victory conferring a right of government was the historical unconcealment. Conquered Japanese Hong Kong, had it eventuated, would have conferred legitimacy thousands of arbitrary assaults, forced morbidities, and rapes, including the acts of collaborators acting as security and gangster proxies for the occupation government. But it was never enough for an occupation government merely to announce the occurrence of conquest. It had to be agreed on after the war had finished in victory. Conquest was a state of grace that, in its anticipation, licenses severity; they feed each other. In the case of Captured Hong Kong, the territory's naming suggested that it was briefly held to one side, even if its heavily martial manner made it feel like conquest.

70  Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators Some sort of reckoning, or trying out, had been going on with such variations in the name – mostly internal and, although occasionally registered in verbal outings, or on buildings and publicly circulated documents, it was an attempt to find what measure was fit for purpose. Without an iota of humour, the renaming purported to bring in something constitutionally fresh while re-enforcing the unreflective severity, the drunken carnage, and hunting women, of the truce. The occupation government carried the weight of its contradictions but did not collapse. Soldiers refrained from dynamiting lakes and streams for fish but locals had to hand over any fish they caught on pain of death. One does not rule over the starving. One superintends them from a place of hypocrisy or torments them knowing they can do no more than whine in self-pity. One polices or invigilates the starving masses. The starving did not expect that their new colonial government would do anything for them except burn their bodies when the time came in the thin sympathy of preventing a disease outbreak. Wrathall noted that, as a historical force, ‘unconcealment consists in bringing things to awareness but also creating the context within which things can be what they are’.7 One could scarcely think of a better example of the flickering force of unconcealment, allowing self-knowledge and knowledge of others in history than emergence into the light of wartime collaborators for whom the basic choice was usually starvation or conniving for the enemy. Let us say a collaborator in occupied Hong Kong was not capable of Dasein or was inauthentic. The Japanese administration had no interest in the 'occupation' usage. Its leaders paid no mind to the civil courtesies 'occupied people' were entitled to under international law except in conferring rights enjoyed by collaborators. International comparisons made irrelevant, they could cast no shade on a Japanese aspiration to the deathly logic of the archive or registry. A possibility of a longer reprieve from death existed for collaborators who, gestureless for fear of offending by presuming the interplay of Dasein, had privileges conferred on them in recognition of their stillness, their ‘notstrivingness’ – including property transfers on preferential terms. They could do better than try to survive the widespread starvation on the ration of five hundred grams of rice (about one catty) and no meat per day. In privileging heightened survival in the present moment over a memory of a living once-lived, those who collaborated with the Japanese told themselves that they were going with the flow of history. They also said they were saving this country or that they were managing through extreme difficulty. They were heroically holding together some kind of normality that, itself, was under threat. With true Nietzschean unconcern, one can give their acceptance of the new status quo whatever moral shade one likes. Choose a point along the following continuum: incidentally complicit, uncomfortable conformity, caught up in things, crumbs off the table, survival with benefits, unavoidable necessity, Judas-posing,

Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators  71 outright betrayal and loving it...etc. There was striving and interface within any such description. Although an object impressed itself on the subject in a neutral space, it should not be mistaken for Dasein. There is no element of play and revision, only rewards for not offering Dasein friction and so allowing the unassimilated object to dominate if only in the rare cases when there was a choice. The question of Dasein, of being there, was about an individual pitted against their environment and making adjustments to realise an internal plan toward validity. It is easy to pick it to pieces in a scene of collaboration when the normal peacetime reciprocities of a human being in the world become intensified and perverse. If we take Dasein in its suggestion of the national destiny of the Chinese people, the implication of validity was not immediately clear. Nationalist China, communist China, and British Hong Kong were at war with the Japanese. Those Chinese who worked for the Japanese in Hong Kong betrayed the historical-spiritual Dasein of which China? Were the Hong Kongers, a mixture of the harried Hakkas and opportunist Cantonese, with their constant coming and going across the border, and maritime yearnings, and long stints overseas, ever 'a people'? Let us say instead that a collaborator in occupied Hong Kong was authentic and could make and receive Dasein plays. I.e. like everyone, a collaborator was ‘inextricably involved in the enterprise of achieving and maintaining a form of life’ as Hofstadter once put it.8 On the other side of the equation, colonial representations to a citizen should be assumed legitimate no matter which national power makes it. There can be no finger pointing at people who collaborate with the new power. In realising a type of mediated life, or ‘attunement’ as Heidegger referred to it, one works with a representation of the number of objects limited to those that are ‘presently-at-hand’.9Those who could sell the occupier scarce diesel fuel at a moderate price had freedom of movement and plenty of food. But even this generous selection of presently-at-hand objects, and freedom to gain more, was not a true spectrum of objects, enabling a full Dasein. This had to be routinely reduced throughout the above and below of occupying colonialism. By taking as read the rules of colonial power, a collaborator established fragile immunity. This was a truncated Dasein space to be sure, full of wariness and compared misfortunes, and anticipations of the worst as a guide to present behaviour, but one that preserved or elevated them in a time of rapid changes often for the worst. The assumption of colonial legitimacy, the sovereign right to draw and confer authenticity through Dasein by nudging and directing, was a small step to survival under any colonial regime but a vital one. It does not matter that a collaborator was capable of Dasein, or not. By being between nations a collaborator could be beyond humanity; a Nietzschean hero! A collaborator took an invader's judgment as an operative truth to be indifferently followed. When personal profit came from

72  Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators a predicament of colonial rule, no guilt need be felt or attributed. It was survivalism. That's all. Collaborators took colonialism as one might take a cube of sugar in one's coffee. With or without the cube, they understood that the resulting drink was still called, ‘coffee’. In the case of Hong Kong before, during, or after the Japanese occupation, it was ridiculous to give collaborators the tag 'selfish' as if they should wish to belong or give loyalty to one colonising nation but not another. Hong Kongers saw little convenience in the nation-state. Nationality or fixed polity, and the expected chauvinism of it, was impressed on them by others when the most they sought was freedom to cross boundaries. Collaborators were merely the first people to grasp the emptiness of colonial rhetoric about care for a jurisdiction. Put another way, they were the first to be reviled for openly calling it out. Our first chrysanthemum: Mrs. Kwok Wai Hing. She had a perfectly understandable reason to sell her apartment in the early months of the Japanese Occupation of Hong Kong. Her wish was to put the proceeds towards a new house on an up-market subdivision in Shameen, Canton (now Guangzhou).10 Although Kwok was a landlord who had sinned by being absent from the colony when the Japanese received the surrender of Hong Kong, she was treated quite differently from others listed as absentee landlords. Such special treatment implied a long association with the Japanese before the war. Those seeking a hasty sale of property could be used as a source of extraordinary tax revenue by the Japanese occupying administrations. It could also expedite a process to reward people in occupied areas. Kwok was quite quick off the mark but not penalised at all. She instigated the 128th property transfer registration of 1942. Some special absentees were permitted the extraordinary privilege to deal freely with their Hong Kong property from a place outside the so-called, ‘Captured Colony’. The Japanese representation that those who had not remained with their property were enemies, devoid of constancy, and to be punished severely, did not apply to Kwok Wai Hing. Experienced in the Japan game, Kwok was a loyalist emerging from an old, rich association ripening in her to a deep indifference. Her connection with the Japanese was excellent and effortless; she had a talent for communication and abundant shows of loyalty from whoever needed it. Beyond human? Probably not. There only has to be a single talent for Nietzsche to declare Superhumanity but her dependency on the confirmation of another indicates she was a first-class passenger, not the rocket ship. Her sublime disinterest had been hidden and now, with a rush of largely unanticipated events, Kwok stood revealed to herself and others as someone who could work with ease with a people who wanted to turn her country into a slave labour camp. The Japanese Deed and associated documents record the sale by Kwok of her 875 sq ft family apartment in December 1942.11 Situated in 40 King Kwong St, Happy Valley, she sold it to our second chrysanthemum,

Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators  73 Mr. Lau Chau Ping, a grain and dried food merchant. Living above his shop in 3F/3 Wing Lok St, Western District, Lau performed the role of indifferent middleman supplying food to the local quartermaster of the Japanese Imperial Army presumably ahead of his starving compatriots. The bulk of the invading force was transferred down to southern theatres of battle in July 1942. A garrison force of conscript soldiers remained behind in Hong Kong to police it. These people needed feeding, as did their road and airstrip-building contractors; everyone else had to take their chances if they did not come in immediately to the Japanese game. Lau was not beyond humanity. Much of the Hong Kong set were like him - buy cheap, sell at a margin. Historical events did not reveal him from concealment because, as the decision dropped, most of commercial Hong Kong tried to play the game rather than be destroyed by it. His was the unimaginative collaboration of self-defence. The identity and civic suitability of all locals, even the trusted like Kwok and Lau, had to be put beyond doubt before they could engage in property transfers in Japanese Hong Kong. There had to be a colonial state representation of doubt in everyone. Benefits flowed as soon as a practice of good citizenship was recognised by the government. To purchase the apartment, Lau needed to satisfy the 'Certificate of Identity' process imposed by the Japanese occupation authorities. This required proof of house occupation, a right of residence, evidence of an appointment letter from the House Registration Office, and a receipt showing payment of property tax. In other parts of the Japanese Empire, this vetting process was called a 'Good Citizen' test. It was only through an individual's assumption of the state's authentic representation that he or she could get on the dance card, as it were. Superhumanity, or the quality of being beyond humanity, must be a strong possibility among collaborators. They know their own mind in a treacherous time. They are not concerned with political or national sides as lines not to be crossed. They have a certain kind of bravery indifferent to public esteem. They are often single-minded in their efforts at currying and winning favour. They are inquisitive, weasel-like in their intelligence. They lack creativity as a key virtue. Their commercial interreliance, enmeshment, stops them from standing apart from others in defiant gestures, much less monumental moments of history. The chrysanthemum, fresh-faced and solicitous, if a little wilted after the months had rolled by, had to deny what everyone told them. They needed to represent as they were represented to by the new government in town. It was less likely that the stamp duty or administrative fees would flow to a colonial master if the subject was told that transfer of land was a privilege given only to trusted collaborators. This new power in town proclaiming ‘Asia for Asians’ surely did so to end the alienation of its chrysanthemums and to proclaim them first among equals in a broad pool of participants. ‘Asia for Our Kind of Asians’

74  Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators was a closer fit for what occurred in the sympathetic wartime fate of the Taiwanese, the Indonesians, and the Burmese. In more closely ruled places, like Hong Kong and Shanghai, there was nevertheless a class of favourites drawn from pre-war business affinities. These were an elite to the base of ostensibly non-enemy taxpayers looking to continue their transactions. The transferor in this case, Kwok, resided outside of Hong Kong. Living across the border in 35 Yi De Road, Canton, she executed a power of attorney with a Hong Kong lawyer who sold the apartment on her behalf for ¥320, 000.12 To sell her house, she was not required to cross the border but, like Lau Chor Ping in Hong Kong, was required to satisfy the bureaucratic routine of residency and occupational legitimacy in Canton, which she did. During the Japanese occupation of the colony, it became renowned for poor rental returns, non-paying tenants, and price inflation devaluing already paltry Military Yen rents in the hands of landlords. The Japanese rulers of Hong Kong, despite the complaints of landlords, did next to nothing about non-paying tenants, or tenants who divided the property of landlords among several sub-tenants, because they saw little point in involving themselves in matters of civil enforcement. Against this background, Kwok Wai Hing sold her Hong Kong apartment. The last thing a hard-nosed operator such as Kwok wanted in those days was a tenant in Hong Kong. To accept the representation of Japanese legitimacy as a government was also a way to avoid the effects of its practical failures. It was badly 'captured' not 'occupied' well. The transferee, the dried food merchant Lau Chor Ping, had ¥320, 000 to spend on an apartment after nearly a year of the occupation. Not quite everyone in Hong Kong was starving or liquidating their jewellery to eat. Kwok got a fair price from a Hong Kong collaborator and did so early in the occupation before runaway inflation took hold. Kwok had no doubt collaborated in some way to avoid being regarded as an absent landlord and a presumed enemy in the landlord audit in the Japanese Register of Enemy Properties (REP) compiled in 1942. Given Lau's profession, it is hard not to see the transaction as a way of shifting money between fellow collaborators with the consent of the Japanese. The human subject transacted with a degraded subject and shunned others as objects unless they could be tools of Japanese monumental will. Monetisation of representative recognitions occurred among an implicated network of speculators. They were comfortable with depleted subjecthood, ambiguity, and indeterminacy. Some of them could be relaxed about capturedness and the tarred subject collaborators were among them. Kwok could spend the money, or reinvest it in property, while it was still worth something and Lau received a spare flat that would soar in value and utility if the British returned to their colony. The dreams of some could come true. The collaborator who survived and was not starved or shot had a chance at anticipative ecstasy, if not reaching beyond humanity.

Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators  75 The documents detailing the transaction between Lau Chor Ping and Kwok Wai Hing suggest that 'Good Citizenship' was a status an individual needed to guard closely to be able to continue to make non-punitive transactions in property. To enter such transactions, one needed a profession or a livelihood and this could only be the case if one continued to offer commercial support to Japanese military objectives. The martial falsity of the Japanese was followed as if it was real, eternal, and the new normal. Everyone who collaborated was in on the act: recognising it to be recognised themselves. Therefore, most people with ordinary affinities survived for a while but risked dying or becoming displaced as the deprivations of occupation life revealed fresh horrors, and deeper sacrifices in solicitous insurances, over time. The unconcealment occurring went to the increasing desperation required of both collaborator and notional resister as the military fortunes of the Japanese grew worse elsewhere in their empire. In Guangzhou, Kwok Wai Hing bought a new house on a recently developed street on the other side of the river (the British residents called this part, ‘The Creek’). It was a new part of town that was proximate to the Shameen Island district but only just beginning to be subdivided and built on in 1942. Kwok Wai Hing's house in Canton has long since been replaced with a towering, up-market apartment block. In 1942, No. 35 was a large block of land fronting directly on to the river. The Hong Kong proceeds bought a large second-floor apartment that would have enjoyed an outlook on riverside parkland stretching from the concession at Shameen toward the Pearl River estuary. Much collaboration was a bet placed on the proceeds of a pre-occupation suggestion that hardened into a representation that had been accepted years back and backed by constancy ever since. The Kwok-Lau transaction had built on old commercial familiarities and occurred in the early days of the occupation. As food at that time remained relatively plentiful, the embarrassment of their special treatment needed only be slight. The Japanese were not using land transfers as an acute tool of wealth extraction, or black market liquidity, as they did when the year of 1944 dawned and an aggressive shakedown began. Until then, the familiarity of the commercial teat masked the possibility of an abrupt legal stricture affecting most chrysanthemums a few years later. Some landowners tried to hold out against the Japanese administrative regime over land. Lau and Kwok gladly answered the call to join the new Japanese reality in the name of personal gains arising as natural incidents of invalid policy prescriptions. Those who were ambivalent about their new ruler had their applications for transfer delayed and in the final eighteen months of the Japanese rule of Hong Kong (1943–1945), their type was well represented in the document trail. A signal feature of Chinese-owned residential property among absent landlords in the REP was revealed by examination of the corresponding Japanese Deeds. What happened to those who were on the list but returned to their homes in

76  Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators Hong Kong? They were given a hard time regarding taxation. Those who were not troubled, who sailed past bureaucratic obstacles with their high good citizenship rating, could only be presumed collaborators in an adjacent commercial matter. It is quite easy to see the difference between the two categories because the Japanese implemented a wait-and-see approach to registration of properties held by once-absent, continuing-to-be-out-of-favour landlords who can, for the sake of simplicity, be called ‘the funeral chrysanthemums’. The funeral chrysanthemums were administratively blocked by the Japanese because they were presumed resistant. Deemed in a timeless fascist impulse to being anti-Japanese by not being pro-Japanese, they were presumed British sycophants, or worse, KMT Chinese Nationalists. Their type would be reprimanded by Nietzsche as holding an 'insipidly false and sentimental' position13 because the funerals held on to British affinity quite openly by not acting in a manner contrary to it. It was as if the British administration, resurrected, would fill their stomachs any day soon or represented some sort of ethical preference not lightly departed from. The administrative scheme instituted by the Japanese ensured that landlords could have no legal dealings with their property until they had proven their submission to the new colonial ruler. For the bulk of their occupations, proof of civic obedience mattered more to the Japanese in hostile ex-British colonies than receipt of stamp duty and/or other transfer taxes. The British tended to assume loyalty from any person who was paying them. They certainly did not insist on it in addition to the cheque. Towards the end of the Japanese occupation, however, the extractive demands steadily placed on Hong Kong's land tax system intensified. Being characterised an indifferent citizen did not necessarily prevent registration of one's property in the end or the ability to transfer it to another. But it came at a higher premium than was paid by the pro-Japanese chrysanthemums. The mandatory Japanese house registration system was implemented by Proclamation No. 30 on 23 July 1942. Yet it took funeral chrysanthemums Li Shing Liang and Li Shing Hiu nearly two years to establish their worthiness to the Japanese to register their property under the registration system. Finally permitted to register their one-bedroom house of the Chinese style on Hollywood Road, these brothers had been kept waiting until 4 April 1944 to do so.14 This can be compared to the situation of Li Cheung On. He had been permitted to register his property under the Japanese system without any serious delay on 3 December 1942. In April 1945, he found a willing buyer, Yeung Yu Lok, for his five compartment storage unit.15 This assignment was permitted by the Japanese Land office provided that payment was made of the modest stamp duty of M¥16, 800.16 The progressive settings encountered by collaborators late in the war can be contrasted to the extortion-like practices used on people who had recognised the representations of the Japanese to legitimacy too late in the day.

Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators  77 Nietzsche posed the dilemma of how, without a grounding in ethics in a time of upheaval, the self can establish truth. This positions the individual, in a Godless freefall, desperately searching for truth and putting it in a system that gave reason and consistency to their behaviour. In short, Nietzsche trusts people to self-validate. In times such as the Japanese occupation of the old British and Dutch colonies of South East Asia, individuals could establish a compass for what was valid without resort to colonial God belief. That to this day, however, we refer to ‘collaborators’ as though nationbelief still matters to an assessment of occupation-era ethics, suggesting that its transcendental pull survived the death of God, or worked as a suitable stand-in for Anglo-American God belief. Violent and thuggish occupying Japanese, for merely being inactive in their support, identified the funeral chrysanthemums. Ethics as an internal ‘thou shalt’ or ‘thou shall not’, when disentangled from national affiliation, can seek its cues from individual, family, or community interests, which do not die out during an occupation but can benefit from its upheaval to find revitalisation. The characteristic of a funeral chrysanthemum's ethical 'thou shalt' is discordance or disattunement in the invader’s sight. The non-aligned were forced to seek solidarity, and internal direction, as ever-fewer human-objects (or human-tools) came ready-to-hand to the Japanese. Glances in the street, and what could still be written between the lines in the occupier's newspapers, made Dasein short on incident, for the chances to repel were limited by the under and above of colonialism. Unaligned people were interpreted as non-believers of the representation. That's how fascism works. Indifference was regarded as contempt or insufferable impudence. Disattunement was an assumption of the invader demonstrated by the everyday person’s inactivity in support of the Japanese. Wong Wing and Wong Kwong were brothers who co-owned a modest three-bedroom tenement in Yong Li St, Hong Kong.17 Wong Wing and his partner, as funeral chrysanthemums, were only permitted to register their property on 24 April 1944. Their property, like that of the Li brothers, had been listed in the REP for being held by an absent landlord. Born in Hong Kong in 1875, Wong Kwong was a shipbuilding engineer. He had worked for Lloyd's Register of British and Foreign Shipping and the Bailey and Co shipyard in Hong Kong. These affiliations were regarded by the Japanese as pro-enemy in nature. Wong spent most of his working life outside of Hong Kong and in 1933 he became managing director of the Sui Fung Co and the Mutual Trading Company, Hankow. No doubt this raised suspicions of a Kuomintang affiliation. A young unrelated woman, Yu Kwong, received power of attorney over the house as soon as it was registered. Wong Kwong would have been 69 years of age in 1944. Yu Kwong satisfied the legal desire of both brothers to divest themselves, at the very least. In this case, there was

78  Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators personal ethics of survivorship in favour of a mistress who was given an asset because she was trusted and presumably loved. So Hung Shi (alias Fung Dong) was another funeral chrysanthemum listed in the REP as a suspect house owner. He had the double misfortune of his father, So Hoi Sui, dying of natural causes and it occurring so close to the Japanese occupation that the British officials had not been able to complete the probate process.18 The will attested that his father was a merchant by trade. The Japanese Land Office had Hung in a difficult bind. If he wanted to take possession of the godown (warehouse) that his father had left him in the will, he would have to give something up. He and his bereaved mother, who had been left the house by her husband, occupied the adjoining tenement house in 57 Wing Lok St. The Japanese solution to the situation was to require the son to pay a steep ¥33, 000 ‘conveyancing fee’.19 He did so in 1944. The choice Hung was effectively making was either to sell the contents of the godown to secure the warehouse itself or sell the adjoining house to keep the godown with its goods. If you deduce this to be colonial state extortion, against a person who had no skill to collaborate with, or a political reason for reluctance in cooperation with the Japanese, it would not be a wild guess. On the face of it, paying an extorter so that at least some of the property could be conveyed does not serve ethics of community solidarity; it reinforces an injustice and confirms other merchants as good targets for it. Or, just like the previous case, a high price was paid for the politics of nation so that a transfer could occur, and money could be loaned against property, for a future business to stock its shelves, and a family could get back to its mercantile calling. From the So Hung Shi transaction it was apparent that, by 1944, the Japanese had perfected their coercion techniques against local, unaligned Cantonese. Economic privation caused an ever-wider number of participants to fall into their net. They were extorting So Hung Shi. He could prove, by a receipt, that he had paid $HK4, 677.35 estate duty to the British on the death of his father. Thus, the Japanese administration did not flinch at the unjust prospect of forcing him to pay twice either because he was suspected as pro-enemy or, perhaps, more prosaically, they thought he was good for it. A case can be made, as I did in the previous essay, that the Japanese occupation was not characterised by certain representations of authority in Hong Kong. Yet this casts into question the meaning of certainty or authenticity when a temporarily occupying administration that manifests doubt nevertheless sits in the placeholder’s position and reaps tax or tribute as if they were legitimate. Under international law, it matters nothing that sovereignty has not been conferred. The validity of tax taking rests simply on being an effective military occupant. Heideggerian questions about authenticity or truth in representation must be put to one side. The administration’s doubt did not have to be the reason for

Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators  79 its representation of capturedness, as a reading of the later Heidegger suggests it could be. All that was required for administrative acts of the rule to be legitimate was effectively holding the barracks, the GPO, and the train station under the force of arms. Rape and torture were erased by conquest but not a mere occupation. In the vein of Nietzsche’s invalid moral judgement treated as if true and real, there was no incentive for acquiring or exercising power authentically. A degree of giving and taking existed in Japanese Hong Kong despite no aligned subject having illusions about state legitimacy – a trick unique to colonialism ensuring that doubt did not make the rule or its representation ineffective. i.e. representations were not based on popular input but already designed for the question: what if I do not recognise it? For the Japanese, the answer was to 'tremble and obey'. For the British, nonrecognition was regarded as stirring up trouble. Deportation or commercial ostracism swiftly followed. The old strategy of 'from a high height, a heavy weight' faces a higher level of scrutiny these days when used against an individual than it did in colonial times. The primacy of state representations is challenged by transnational crime, trade multilateralism, and multinational corporations. Individual injustice or state invalidity becomes miniaturised beneath this broader aegis. State invalidity in a judgement becomes a detail. What occurs in the ephemeral, untouchable, media-conjured internationality is what is. Next, the post-1946 Hong Kong fortunes of the Chinese bourgeois nationalist option, the Kuomintang, are assessed. The focus is on the Heideggerian clearing of self-unconcealing that occurred slowly within the KMT as it became clear that its forces would lose the civil war.

Acknowledgments Dr. Guobin Zhu translated all deed documents in this chapter, with additional assistance from Dr. Rita Cheung in May 2010).

Notes 1 Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History, 156. 2 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 239. 3 Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 93. 4 Heidegger, The History of Beyng, 139. 5 Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History, 156. 6 Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History, 156. 7 Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment, 2. 8 Hofstadter, ‘The Philosophy in History’, 239. 9 Davis, Heidegger and the Will, 8. 10 HKRS 57-6-128 (JD); I.L. 3330. 11 HKRS 57-6-128 (JD); I.L. 3330. 12 HKRS 57-6-128 (JD); I.L. 3330.

80  Dasein of the Chrysanthemum Collaborators 3 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil,109. 1 14 HKRS57-6-8669 (JD) I.L. 4205. 15 HKRS57-6-9221 (JD) I.L. 3940. 16 HKRS57-6-9221 (JD) I.L. 3940. 17 HKRS57-6-8639 (JD) I.L. 423. 18 HKRS57-6-9091 (JD). 19 HKRS57-6-9091 (JD).

Bibliography Davis, Bret. Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gellasenheit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007). Gillespie, Michael. Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984). Heidegger. The History of Beyng trans. Geoffery Powell and William McNeill (Bloomington: University of Indian Press, 2015). Hofstadter, Albert. ‘The Philosophy in History,’ in Sydney Hook (ed), Philosophy and History (New York: New York University, 1970). Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003). Russell, Bertrand. History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1961). Wrathall, Mark. Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Archival Public Record Office of Hong Kong (Kwun Tong) HKRS 57-6-128 (JD); I.L. 3330 HKRS 57-6-128 (JD); I.L. 3330. HKRS 57-6-128 (JD); I.L. 3330. HKRS57-6-8669 (JD) I.L. 4205. HKRS57-6-9221 (JD) I.L. 3940. HKRS57-6-9221 (JD) I.L. 3940. HKRS57-6-8639 (JD) I.L. 423. HKRS57-6-9091 (JD). HKRS57-6-9091 (JD).

7 Fading Validity KMT Nationalism in Hong Kong (1946–1950)

Heidegger saw Dasein as a condition of possibility appearing for human beings – an intermediate and albeit placeless place between subject and object. Colouring the interactions of beings were the lights of temporality shown by thrashing about in thrownness (the past). Offering care filled the present moment. Feeling angst over finitude or the ecstasy of anticipation comprised the future. Truth is revealed to human beings by an endless sequence of rising above and dipping below, unconcealment and concealment, driven by our cares and our potential to deliver a truer view of ourselves. As a motive for history, Heidegger’s implication is clear in explaining why political movements tire and retire. It could be falling out of date as an explanation for why it takes some movements so long to recognise their invalidity, or the perversion of Dasein currently obtaining in the world. Dasein has been interrogated in recent years, suspected of nothingness, by a worldly insistence on abandoning a subject-view for an objectview. For some, this edict has freed human beings to take their place in a democracy of animals. For others, we are objects waiting our turn in the technological stockpile to be of use. Whistling the irritating ditty of our dishwasher when it finishes a cycle, we are hardwired, on transmit, and glued to social media. We are machines. Dasein was a shadowland once used to find the validity of Being. The Jeremy Irons supposition prevailed for a while. We acted sincerely in account and to the account of others in pursuit of subjective truth. We have something better now. Seeming. We aspire to the servitude of limitless selfhood. We cultivate an image of never-not-presentness. Other people notice this. They call it nice things like ‘professionalism’ or ‘attentiveness’. Not only has seeming eclipsed Being, it never manifested as it was supposed. By holding open the distinction between subject and object, Dasein should have been a powerful force out and down in the colonies. Available to all. But it was not. Dasein trailed behind racial and religious protocols of thrownness. Not everyone could be accorded a Dasein space, or have their care recognised, or have an opportunity to adjust in

82  Fading Validity cosmopolitan goodwill to fresh contingency. Thrownness had the ingenious implication of appearing so severe in native races as to preclude their striving, or in the British colonial eye, records being kept of it even when the striving was world-class. If Dasein was ever important in a colonial context, then it could only come out with a stern pink face in times of rebellion and desperation. The British colonial world made a specialty out of clinging on despite unconcealing forces moving in a tectonic groan beneath it. People, it seemed, needed constantly to be reminded about the important reforms to colonial self-conception that never saw it put out of power. The validities represented by electricity to the suburbs, the height of the G.P.O. flagstaff, and the legends of alabaster statues, suggested that loyal participation open Dasein opportunities, not resistance. The placeholder colonialism in British Hong Kong flirted with pragmatism so blatantly that its failure of meaning looked to be close to revealing. British colonialism became undeniably ‘late’ after the Second World War. The bourgeois Chinese nationalist party, the Kuomintang was slowly starved of funds by its weary American backers. It was increasingly beaten militarily by the communist Chinese. These circumstances posed a dilemma for the British in Asia, and its constituency of flighty stockjobbers in London who carefully protected their monopolism over rubber and the dregs of opium by cheating Chinese smallholders. Would Whitehall accord the KMT recognition as the only true government of China or would it pave the way for recognition of communist China? How would communist Chinese recognition affect the nice little thing that Hong Kong had become? The Chinese communist and British colonial administration of Hong Kong reached the same conclusion. The KMT leadership had lost its sense of constituency by the later 1940s. The flight of its remnants to Hong Kong, Malaya and Taiwan required the British to be on side. The agreed loss of representative mandate allowed destinations to the KMT, not new staging grounds for a return to the mainland or a prominent role in intercepting communism in Southeast Asia. The top leadership went to Taiwan. The generals who loathed Chiang went to Hong Kong and the Golden triangle. Fate had already struck a fatal blow in 1949. The civil war was over. This was the epochal moment of unconcealment. The British of post-war Hong Kong took an official line that the Kuomintang was not to be recognised diplomatically. The Administration was nevertheless consumed in pro-KMT financial compensation and harbouring its intrigues from 1950 until 1963. In such circumstances, continual British representations of their mutual indifference to the KMT and the communist Chinese has arisen as unchallengeable mythology. Colonial ambivalence is an attitude where Heidegger speaks. That is, taking at face value the representation of poker-faced indifference as a cue for underlying certainty, or constancy about anything, was a mistake.

Fading Validity  83 Colonial proscription of a political organisation did not preclude the possibility of favourable treatment to many individuals within its bounds. I.e. colonial principle pretended certain severity against enemies. Laissezfaire, as a key representation despite monopoly, promoted a purposeful ambiguity about them that remained open to a feeling as if endorsed as valid. Rightist nationalist political organisations were banned in Hong Kong as soon as their heads popped up. But there was no incrimination to be found in its chambers of commerce or suburban badminton locker rooms, only the sullen aroma of pent up old men remembering a time when they made the world for themselves and outsiders nodded approvingly of what they did. Now, they were left untroubled to get on with business. Their anti-communism was ignored. Heidegger suggested that ‘truth means the unconcealing release of being … [the] clearing of self-concealing’.1 No great bout of self-knowledge was needed for the KMT diaspora to Southeast Asia to see the rising communist threat or the opportunities it presented across the region. Yet it would be ridiculous for it to fight communism on colonialism's behalf. It would be insane for the British to allow Rightists to organise themselves militarily inside their colonies. The clearing of the KMT self-concealing came with its loss of a Mainland China foothold when all of these realities came home to roost. The truth was a lack of internal validity that sounded in the unconcealing through military defeat. The revelation of it as a ludicrous and impossible political association emerged in fresh paradoxes of diaspora life. The colonial cornering of the KMT into an outwardly non-political association of closely monitored businesspeople was not enough. Until they knew that they were in an objectively hopeless situation, they would always take permitted urban business activities as an affirmation that where there was life there was hope. Representation is challenged and doubted by other parties in pursuit of their freedom to exist as they would like. In this case, the growing doubt of the British of Hong Kong and the Chinese communists alike that the KMT leadership had a popular constituency became a barbershop harmony of both in the late 1940s. In the case of the communists, they contended contradictory positions that China was engaged in a class struggle between the propertied class (the KMT) and the propertyless class (them) and yet Chiang represented only a handful of men in a selfinterested clique. Chang Fei-hsiung, an author who championed a centrist third force in Chinese politics in the early 1950s, agreed that Chiang Kai-shek stood only for himself, as well as key clique members Ch’en Li-fu and Ch’en Cheng. ‘The unpleasant facts are that Chiang represents neither the Kuomintang nor the propertied class’, Chang Fei-hsiung contended. ‘Long ago, Chiang lost contact with the propertied class that he supposedly represented’.2

84  Fading Validity Let us say that the KMT under Chiang Kai-shek had lost connection with the propertied class in China and that, as a result, the civil war was not a class war. It was a case of American-armed warlords with Chiang at the top versus the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Chiang contended that his national government, in some form or other, from 1927 to 1949 on the basis, however, was the anti-communist, pro-capitalism, pro-private property, and pro-freedom of movement party of China. When the CCP came to power in 1949, the merchants, landlords, and bureaucrats loosely affiliated with the KMT understood that the inculcation of proletarian values would not be a passing phase. Nor was the close supervision of every aspect of public life or the massive land reforms. The penalty of death for subversion or dissent was a constant threat. The middle-class had lost their right to be consulted. Before 1949, the propertied class did not have to be card-carrying members of the KMT to benefit from the space it created for people of their kind. Therefore, after 1949, the communist suggestion, and that of the British imperialists, that the KMT had lost its way was little more than an observation that the KMT had lost power and that – contrary to Chang Fei-hsiung’s view – so had the propertied class it represented. It was widely thought that the KMT merely represented the swindling and proclivities for Mammon of three or so senior figures. Or, as the American government noted in the mid-1970s long after the exile to Taiwan, ‘as the Government of the Republic of China is essentially a one-man government so it is essentially a one-party government. The KMT's political tutelage [of China] ostensibly ended in 1947 but the party's political hegemony has not been altered.’3 While the KMT held the reins of a national, anti-communist government, it provided opportunities to followers to convince themselves that they pursued certainty. Before the fall of mainland government, Chiang Fei-shang also observed that many well-to-do KMT people in the late 1940s swapped their allegiance to the side of the CCP. This was because 'they were impressed by communist propaganda for democracy, freedom, respect of private property and the rights of merchants and labourers'.4 Based on such undertakings, they therefore ‘welcomed the idea of throwing off the Kuomintang’.5 After the fall, and remaining disappointed by the Communists, they developed a quixotic belief in both Taiwan’s democratic constitution of Sun Yat-sen’s ideals and that it could be eventually realised by a military strongman who had fallen from grace. The CCP would in practice always be far from its ideals. Yet if the KMT had held national government as an acceptable stand-in for truth or validity, then there was no reason in principle why the CCP should not be offered the same assumption. Two generations of western historians since 1949 have given no assumption of legitimacy to the CCP or been honest that the government of U.S.-backed warlords was rankly inconsistent with their professed liberalism.

Fading Validity  85 In the line of Heidegger, a contrasting set of certainty values was unveiled by the CCP. The remaining merchants and landlords came to know how relatively free that they had been to pursue the default freedoms enabled by KMT rule although it was ingrained by gangster monopolism and a bribe network at the highest level of government controlling market access. A poll taken in 1946 of Right-wing Chinese business people exiled in Malaya, who were not members of the KMT, revealed that ‘the Chinese family system’ was regarded as ‘the root of all evil and responsible for the widespread bribery and corruption among civil servants’.6 China was regarded as being rife with ‘clannish interference in government, business and industry’.7 Therefore, the conservative Right and the far Left were in accord about at least one key indicator of inauthenticity in KMT governance. The CCP's propaganda of reasonable correction, including its apparent openness to a national unity government in the dying days of the civil war, suggested that the path to government was to ease into it with a conciliatory purpose. The serious business of radical reform got underway sooner than most thought it would. Very few people predicted the open-heart surgery with blunt scalpels that was to follow. The contradiction of the British was that they could accept the disillusioned KMT remnants into Hong Kong for their business dynamism and labour value and agree with the Communists that the KMT had lost for the good reason that its lack of constituency had been revealed. That was why the only representation the British made of Hong Kong was of its commercial freedom and stability under them. Offering higher certainties such as democratic participation was a low priority for the kinds of Chinese middle-class refugees attracted to Hong Kong who had been disappointed by the CCP promises of it and instead valued the KMT-style open space for small businesses to pursue lesser certainties. Hong Kong's current crop of protesters shouts their frustrated democratic slogans only once their greatest small-target uncertainty becomes one lesser. This idea will be developed in Chapter 13. Should Heidegger be taken at his most brittle: ‘even if representing is a kind of doubting’ then what does he mean that ‘constancy…can never be doubted’8? Let us suppose in the case of colonial Hong Kong there was seldom doubt in its administration. Not only were the masters of the colonial contest always rigging it, but they also had self-knowledge of how two-faced they were. Independent and radical representations, nationalist and otherwise, stood little chance against such a disabling colonial presence of mind – one that brings to mind Nietzschean realism about the knowingly invalid being treated as if valid. Sometimes, if only occasionally, British colonials in Hong Kong were worried for a very good reason. The appearance of worry formed part of their general defence of colonial prerogative, but this was not about that. On its return to Hong Kong, the British Administration recognised

86  Fading Validity that: 'underground activities against the Japanese during the war enabled the Kuomintang to achieve a position in Hong Kong much in advance of anything that had been possible before 1939'.9 Many of the problems of the re-occupying British were to do with the influence of the KMT across the trade union movement. It was involved in the civic, port, and business groups, as well as the charity and cultural sectors. The Administration embarked on a course of vilification of KMT officials who were perceived as inconveniently principled. Lee Tai Chiu, Hong Kong's local head of the KMT in 1946, was ‘noted’ but not ‘recognised’ by Governor Sir Mark Young, as he kept the seat warm for a successor, Alexander Grantham, who would see no need for constitutional change in the colony. According to the British Administration of Hong Kong, ‘much of the difficulty with the Kuomintang authorities’ could be ‘ascribed’ to ‘the aggressive nature and ambitious self-importance of this person’.10 The allowances given to those acting in a will to power was an exclusively British concept. The quality of Lee that no doubt riled the colonial government was his positioning as an alternative source of governance in the colony. Hence, the British reluctance to recognise the organisational position of the KMT. The British position was amusing because it shared an uncanny resemblance to CCP propaganda from 1949 about Chiang Kai-shek not representing the rank and file of the KMT. One CCP doubt-sewing rant from Hong Kong in that year claimed: Chiang's government cannot represent the KMT. In the present civil war, which is not a dispute between the Nationalists and the communists, there are two camps – a group of landlords, bureaucrats, and compradores headed by Chiang Kai-shek, who uses armed force to suppress people, and a democratic united front, representing people who oppose suppression by armed force.11 Despite such simplifications, the British of Hong Kong and the Communist Chinese both shared, whatever the internal contradictions of each, or the thin propositions beneath their hyperboles, a doubt in the representational right of the KMT. The historical longevity of each doubter could in some way be attributed to their relative certainty. The CCP identifying the KMT as the proxy party of the urban landlords was both true and important, so much so, I will pick it up again later. It needs to be noted that there was impenetrable docility among the 'questionable families' of the dissident southern provinces of China after 1949; one report referred to the reception of a wave of fresh public education campaigns launched by the CCP about the continuing urgency of the class struggle. The wearied people found the 'incessant propaganda' was 'unprogressive, unconvincing, uncompromising and totally unavoidable'.12

Fading Validity  87 In 1946, the British, in saying that the KMT lacked representative heft, was far off the mark; even embarrassingly so in their lack of political sense. In existential terms, in 1946, the British administration encountered a KMT organisation in Hong Kong operating freely, and to the extent of British irritation and its clandestine preferences, representing Chinese nationalism quite openly in the colony. What was the KMT conundrum for the British during their period of re-occupying weakness? The KMT was both ‘a branch of the political party which at the present time forms the central government of China’ and that its ‘aim is to permeate the whole life of the Chinese community of Hong Kong’.13 With a tone of alarm, the Commissioner of Chinese Affairs, Hong Kong, noted resumed KMT influence in schools and education, control of the vernacular press, control of trade unions. The infiltration of cultural activities was used to bring individuals and societies into its fold. Lee, it was suggested, should be replaced with someone who ‘would work in proper subordination to the diplomatic representative of the Chinese government’.14 This was the influence that the colonial government wanted, but not at the cost of ‘regularising’ the position of the Chinese government representative or ‘raising the future of Hong Kong’.15 In Malaya by 1948, the British administration there contended that ‘the existence of the KMT in Malaya is an obstacle to the political progress of the Chinese in Malaya’.16 It felt this was the case because the KMT ‘stands for Chinese nationalism and cannot give leadership in pursuit of political rights of Chinese in this country’.17 The KMT by this time was felt, by the British, to fight a different fight and could not through mere anti-communism assist the British in their task of ‘Malaysianisation of the Chinese’.18 Moreover, Sir Henry Gurney, the High Commissioner to Malaya, believed by the end of 1948 that, despite the expansion of KMT influence since 1945, it did not have a 'sufficiently strong hold' over its members ‘to be able to coerce them into a last-ditch stand against communism here’.19 The shortfall in Heidegger's idea of certainty, as an outcome of internal doggedness and constancy, could not be clearer in a colonial context. Certainty could not rely only on the inner strength of colonial actors or the Powers that put them in play. Treating invalid judgements as if they were valid passed for certainty, as Nietzsche suggested, and this state of affairs was more acceptable to the colonial mind than doubt, which could be fatal to certainty when highly coloured and garbled accounts appeared in Nationalist newspapers. Even if representation sprang from doubt, it could not be named as doubt. This was the story of the British administration of Hong Kong 1946-1947. But as the late 1940s dawned there was a brief spurt of confidence in British governing circles. Pursuing invalid colonial judgements as if valid came in the form of the KMT being stopped by picking on individual troublemaking leaders in its ranks or questioning whether its hold on vernacular Chinese

88  Fading Validity education was good for the Chinese of Hong Kong. The desperation and overwhelming need of its Chinese people to feel represented, and cared for, meant that an offer of indoctrinating education was better than none at all. However, from 1948 onward the British returned to ascendancy for little more reason than the rank factionalism in the Central Government of China under the KMT. Its Legislative Yuan had several competing factions making legislative and unified policy-making impossible; the Generalissimo himself was reported to control no more than 25 percent of its voters.20 This is not to say that the KMT government on Mainland China was in any regard exemplary after 1945 or that it was some sort of exporter of enlightenment values. On one U.S. account, the Central government ‘appears to have no answer except Gestapo action to Chinese student, labor and liberal press agitation for economic improvement and cessation of China’s civil conflict’.21 In 1947, the KMT government had martial law in place in all major Chinese cities within its influence except Nanking. The U.S. military attaché in Nanking believed that the government would ‘weather the storm by ruthless repression’ because the demonstrations and media resistance were poorly orchestrated.22 One could be abolitionist about colonial recognition, but this feels like revisionism wishing a current problem to go away. Colonial recognition needed opposition itself to achieve certainty – even if it was simply to make fun of the ways that locals spoke English. The British position demanded obedience to their colony even though many areas of Hong Kong's life were under the strong influence of their Chinese nationalist adversaries. The position of the KMT in 1946 was one of interior strength because it had filled a vacuum of British interior weakness; KMT certainty was based on resistance activities that continued throughout the Japanese occupation into the British reoccupation of Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore. By 1948, the British Administration led by Franklin Gimson in Singapore became concerned about ‘a rearguard action’ by the KMT army in the colony, as its officers were felt ‘pointed in this direction’.23 Gimson’s fear of a large-scale influx of KMT evacuees did not eventuate but his prediction did come true that if the Communists got control of mainland China, the Singapore government would try to ‘strengthen the hand of local-born Chinese and Malayan domiciled Chinese’.24 In 1947, the tentative confidence of the British Administration in Hong Kong saw it make an overture to the Americans. It was hoping that 'they saw value for themselves in British retention of Hong Kong as a place where they might conduct trade with China in conditions such as have already disappeared from China itself’.25 They might ‘use their influence with a majority Kuomintang Government of China to secure that the Kuomintang did not achieve the disappearance of such conditions from China also’.26 The British certainty in their administration of Hong Kong

Fading Validity  89 had not returned fully yet, and neither had business in the colony. They had the confidence just enough to play the middleman of governments and to appear as if a lesser evil. Let us fast forward to 1949 to survey the political conditions in British Hong Kong. That year finds the new Governor Grantham ‘anxious that effective action should be taken with the least possible delay to reduce and if possible terminate the Kuomintang’s influence in Hong Kong’.27 In 1947, the Foreign Office had licenced the colonial government to formulate ‘ad hoc measures as might be possible’ against the KMT and to collect evidence with a view to the expulsion of the KMT as ‘an emergency demands’.28 Such a policy was raised before it was clear that the Communists would prevail on the mainland and Hong Kong became a refuge for a surge of Rightist KMT elements after 1949 and a policy ambivalence toward them set in. That, by losing the civil war, the certainty exhibited by the KMT in 1946 in Hong Kong diminished considerably as it moved from being an opponent government to a broke guest who no longer threatened the originalist theme always played by the British in the colony. Yet there were problems with the characterisation of the KMT as a broke guest in Hong Kong whom the colonial government amassed evidence on in anticipation of the need to evict. From July to October 1949, the flight of bureaucratic and personal capital from China was estimated to be around US$ 500 million.29 About half of this sum was personal capital remitted overseas by persons ‘frightened by the stories of KMT special agents of the dire things the CCP will practice on the wealthy’.30 Much of the retreating capital was funnelled to the U.S., Canada, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. Hong Kong cornered 'the capital of most of the lesser bureaucrats'31 and it was regarded as ‘one of the three main transfer points for fleeing bureaucratic capital’.32 From the first part of July 1949, it was reported that the Hong Kong banking system averaged receipts of HK$ 5 million per day up to HK$20 million. 33 Most of this was carried from Canton personally in the form of Hong Kong dollars, American dollars, and gold. There was an account that estimated 70, 000 ounces of gold representing the merchant wealth of Chongqing and Kunming passed through Hong Kong.34 When the British made character assessments of the political validity of the KMT senior leadership as the civil war came to a close, such large flows of capital and valuable metals into Hong Kong in 1949 could not be ignored. As a direct beneficiary, Hong Kong's banking system could, in large part, fund the reconstruction of the city based on the largesse brought by middle-ranking Canton bureaucrats by the sale of state property, not to consider its significant role as a transfer hub shuttling sums of money from Mainland China to the world. The highest-ranking KMT officials sold their houses to banks in which they had controlling interests; the lesser bureaucrats headed for Hong Kong usually conducted hurried

90  Fading Validity sales and lost up to 75% of the value of their houses.35 Although the Chiang, Soong, Kung, and Ma millions found their way across the globe, landing chiefly in the US, Canada, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Thailand, Hong Kong did very well by receiving the KMT's 'B Team' exodus – hailing chiefly from Canton. The British administration did not think so little of KMT legitimacy as to shun the largesse of its middle leadership and was posturing on this point for the benefit of the Chinese communists, who themselves reputedly referred to the British as ‘like a jade prostitute’. But this is not remarkable; the Chinese communists had a coarse epithet for literally every race and nationality under the sun. According to a CIA source in late 1949, as the new communist broom swept through, several thousands of KMT officials were fired from government posts in Canton. They fled to Hong Kong 'where, disillusioned and practically starving, they join the ranks of the expanding army of discontented elements in Hong Kong who talk and write unceasingly against nationalist leaders'36. Certainly, the specific nature of the Ta Kung Pao report on the fleeing capital of the KMT that the CIA relied on was the work of someone with inside connections to the KMT. Those who remained in Canton were, remarkably, retained or rehired by the Communist government on an interim basis and offered the same salary as previously enjoyed.37 No doubt the measures were driven by a temporary lack of qualified Party members to fill the roles and does not obscure the millions of KMT members who were murderously purged or imprisoned in Szechuan by the CCP in 1950-1952. Nevertheless, it showed that the CCP, by using KMT bureaucrats as expedient placeholders, could recognise that they blamed the country's predicament on the senior leadership of the KMT, which did not represent their needs or interests. The Communists and their capitalist-colonialist adversaries agreed on one important thing. As Heidegger put it in his later writings: ‘anticipation’ is a state within Dasein that is both ‘concealed and attested’.38 The shortcoming in the credibility of the KMT leadership was visible well before 1949. So many symptoms of it coincided at the same time throughout 1948–1949. There can be no denying Henry Miller’s idea that ‘once you give up the ghost, everything follows with absolute certainty, even in the midst of chaos’.39 The trouble with the KMT was that the ghost had given it up, but it would not give up the ghost even when giving up was the only option in front of it. In April 1950, the KMT’s Foreign Minister, Yeh Kung-ch’ao complained on the world stage that the use by the communist Chinese of Russian combat capabilities against the KMT was in breach of the 1945 Sino-Soviet Friendship Pact which recognised China’s independence and territorial integrity.40 The KMT had lost national government, now it was lecturing the Russians for helping its usurpers as if what happened within the territorial limits of China was still its affair, or that there was a China beyond Taiwan that it spoke for. The Foreign

Fading Validity  91 Minister had notified the United Nations of the breaches. He claimed he had been requested (by whom we do not know) to send naval observers to check for Soviet submarines in the China Sea and air observers to spot Soviet military and non-military advisers who were said to be ‘occupying’ cities in central China.41 Whatever the veracity of these claims, they were grounded in a righteous view that, historically, the Chinese communists had not played fair and that this had an effect on their legitimacy that the world should not take seriously even though they had won the civil war. Whatever one might conclude about the world’s uneven recognition of the People’s Republic of China after 1949, even the KMT’s staunchest allies, including the U.S. Department of State, had given up the ghost on returning it to the free world, and the KMT playing any serious role in that happening. Throughout the fleeing from Mainland China, the KMT represented itself calmly in the world media, as if a minor setback had been encountered and that it had a proud record of probity in government. On 25 March 1950, KMT branches and newspapers were asked to ‘publicise the vast improvements made in nationalist China since Chiang Kai-shek resumed the presidency’ and to ‘expose the miseries of the people and the corruption in Communist China’.42 The KMT under the watch of Premier Cheng Chen was going to emphasise ‘military training for the protection of Taiwan and the assault on the mainland’.43 The propaganda of the KMT could not adjust from the enjoyment of government in nationhood to the reality of being backed into the corner of Taiwan and the leadership’s further diminished representative footprint. The only slim hope of the KMT immediately after the civil war’s conclusion in 1949 was its access to American intelligence or, at least, its ability to stoke the State Department’s paranoia that China would become a puppet state of Stalinist Russia. The CIA and the State Department were superbly informed about ‘the considerable difficulty’ that consolidation of Soviet control would face, including how unwelcome in Chinese circles would be ‘the subservience that Moscow will undoubtedly demand of China’.44 Nevertheless, the KMT was listening attentively when it was observed that ‘until evidence emerges that an effective opposition is emerging [to Mao's pro-Stalinist clique] it follows that the Chinese communists will remain allies of Moscow’.45 Into this information gap, the exiled KMT loved to plug all sorts of information about the unchecked ‘Sovietification’ of China, which in any event, came to an abrupt halt in 1956. Taipei advised the Americans that since the Sino-Soviet Pact of 1950, many Russians had arrived in China to ‘occupy supervisory government positions’.46 Refugee KMT elements reported that of the 6000 Russian experts in Shanghai, some 2000 of them were air force ground personnel and anti-aircraft gunners and the balance had joined the Shanghai police and municipal government.47 Not even solid intelligence of Russian infiltration of Chinese life was enough

92  Fading Validity to resurrect American support for the KMT. The finitude of the KMT was driven by their military losses to the Chinese communists. The loss of faith in them by the Americans hurt it too. The British were a patchy ally at best and the communist Chinese were a worthy adversary. All these elements were reasons for their representations becoming shrill and alarmist immediately after the point of no return. Next, I consider the legacy of the Maria Hertogh riots in 1950. They signalled that the British were fading as a colonial power and, as one report put it, ‘have now become an object lesson for harmonious multiracial relations’ in Singapore.48

Notes 1 Heidegger, The History of Beyng, 171. 2 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600400173-5: ‘China’s Future’, 2. 3 CIA-RDP01-00707R000200080025-0: ‘Nationalist Intelligence Survey’, 11. 4 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600400173-5: ‘China’s Future’, 3. 5 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600400173-5: ‘China’s Future’, 3. 6 CIA-RDP82-00457R000200070015-0: ‘Chinese Activities’, 2. 7 CIA-RDP82-00457R000200070015-0: ‘Chinese Activities’, 2. 8 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 29. 9 CO 537/1658: ‘Hong Kong: KMT Activities’, [24]. 10 CO 537/1658: ‘Kuomintang Activities’, [25]. 11 CIA-RDP82-00457R002500280005-3, ‘Officers and Men of the KMT’, [10]. 12 CIA-RDP79S01008A000100060002-5, ‘Assessment of 1965 Dissidence Levels’, 3–4. 13 CO 537/1658: ‘KMT Activities’, [28]. 14 CO 537/1658: ‘KMT Activities’, [32]. 15 CO 537/1658: ‘KMT Activities’, [32]. 16 CO 537/4252: ‘The KMT in Malaya’, [1]. 17 CO 537/4252: ‘Extract from Political Report’, [1]. 18 CO 537/4252: ‘Extract from Political Report’, [1]. 19 CO 537/4252: Gurney to SSC, [3]. 20 CIA-RDP79-01082A000100010015-3: ‘Intelligence Highlights’, 7. 21 CIA02996865: ‘Book VI’, [6] – [7]. 22 CIA02996865: ‘Book VI’, [7]. 23 CO 537/2192: Gimson to SSC, [v]. 24 CO 537/2192: Gimson to SSC, [vi] 25 CO 537/2192: ‘KMT Activities’, [18]. 26 CO 537/2192: ‘KMT Activities’, [18]. 27 CO 537/2192: ‘KMT Activities’, [6]. 28 CO 537/2192: ‘KMT Activities’, [1c]. 29 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600260281-1: ‘Chinese Capital’, 1. 30 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600260281-1: ‘Chinese Capital’, 1. 31 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600260281-1: ‘Chinese Capital’, 1. 32 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600260281-1: ‘Chinese Capital’, 1. 33 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600260281-1: ‘Chinese Capital’, 1. 34 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600260281-1: ‘Chinese Capital’, 2. 35 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600260281-1: ‘Chinese Capital’, 2. 36 CIA-RDP82-00457R003000490003-6: ‘Communist Republic’, [2]. 37 CIA-RDP82-00457R003000490003-6: ‘Communist Republic’, [1].

Fading Validity  93 8 Heidegger, Being and Time, 285. 3 39 Miller, The Tropic of Capricorn, 9. 40 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600310697-4: ‘KMT Report Mao Head’, [2]. 41 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600310697-4: ‘KMT Report Mao Head’, [2]. 42 CIA-RDP82-00457R005200440005-5: ‘KMT and Chung Shing Jit Pao’, [2]. 43 CIA-RDP82-00457R005200440005-5: ‘KMT and Chung Shing Jit Pao’, [2]. 44 CIA-RDP78-01617A003500040004-5: ‘Prospects of Soviet Control’, 1. 45 CIA-RDP78-01617A003500040004-5: ‘Prospects of Soviet Control’, 9. 46 CIA-RDP82-00457R005200440005-5: ‘KMT and Chung Shing Jit Pao’, [2]. 47 CIA-RDP82-00457R005200440005-5: ‘KMT and Chung Shing Jit Pao’, [2]. 48 ‘Maria Hertogh Dies Aged 72’, Today, 16.

Bibliography Heidegger. The End of Philosophy trans. Joan Stambaugh (London: Souvenir Press, 1973). Heidegger. Being and Time trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York, 1996). Heidegger. The History of Beyng trans. Geoffery Powell and William McNeill (Bloomington: University of Indian Press, 2005). Henry Miller, The Tropic of Capricorn (New York: Grafton Books, 1966).

Archival Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Digital Reading Room CIA02996865: ‘Book VI – Daily Summary (1 April 1947). CIA-RDP01-00707R000200080025-0: ‘Nationalist Intelligence Survey 39B, Nationalist China, Government and Politics’ (April 1974). CIA-RDP79-01082A000100010015-3: ‘Intelligence Highlights No. 6’ (15 June 1948). CIA-RDP79S01008A000100060002-5, ‘Assessment of 1965 Dissidence Levels in Five Provinces of Southern China’ (1 April 1966). CIA-RDP80-00809A000600260281-1,‘Chinese Capital Transferred Abroad, KMT Bureaucrats Liquidate Holdings’ (24 October 1949). CIA-RDP80-00809A000600400173-5: ‘China’s Future and a Third Force’ (3 July 1951). CIA-RDP82-00457R000200070015-0: ‘Chinese Activities’ (Malaya). CIA-RDP82-00457R002500280005-3, ‘Li Chi-shen, To the Officers and Men of the Kuomintang’ (15 March 1949). CIA-RDP82-00457R003000490003-6: ‘Communist Republic of Former KMI (sic) Officials’ (5 August 1949). Hong Kong Public Records (Kwun Tong) CO 537/1658: ‘Hong Kong: Kuomintang Activities’ (1946). CO537/2192 ‘Hong Kong: Kuomintang Activities’ (1949). CO537/2192: ‘Inward Telegram to the Secretary of State for the Colonies from Singapore (Sir F Gimson) No. 962’ (22 November 1948).

94  Fading Validity CO 537/4252: ‘The Kuomintang in Malaya: Extract from Political Report No 1 from the Federation of Malaya’ (1948). CO 537/4252: ‘The Kuomintang in Malaya: Inward Telegram to the Secretary of State for the Colonies from the Federation of Malaya (Sir H Gurney) No. 1545’ (1 December 1948), [3].

Newspapers ‘Maria Hertogh Dies Aged 72’, Today – 2nd ed (10 July 2009).

8 Representing Christendom Singapore’s Maria Hertogh Riots (1950)

Anyone with a passing interest in colonialism in South East Asia knows about the Maria Hubertina Hertogh child custody case and the riots it sparked in Singapore on 11-13 December 1950. This family law controversy threw a colony into chaos. It has the quality of a cautionary tale of colonialism. Numerous column inches over the years and academic rehashes of the episode demonstrate a refusal in Singapore and Malaysia to leave the story in the past. In 1989, well-publicised plans for Maria to return for a visit were said to have ‘stirred Islamic and nationalist sentiments among the Malay community’ of Singapore.1 In 2010, a historian noted, that even after 50 years the Hertogh case ‘was still deemed too sensitive to open the local archives’ to PhD researchers.2 I did not find this to be the case in 2019 in the Singapore National Archive. There were no problems when I went in search of the transcripts of the Commission of Inquiry into the riots. Yet there can be little doubt that strong passions remain over this episode. The reason for the resonance of the Hertogh case was obvious enough in its time. Religious and constitutional questions in a British colony were raised by whether an abandoned teenage girl was Muslim or Christian. When a colonial court ruled that Maria Hertogh was a Catholic Christian who should be repatriated to her parents in Holland, it touched off a riot in which eighteen people were left dead and 173 injured.3 In many British colonies, such a toll was no more than a busy couple of nights in the township outpatient’s hospital should an over-zealous policing operation encounter some lightly armed resistance. Nor does the loss and damage to private property totalling S$ 20, 848, or the anti-European nature of the rioting especially commend the episode to memory.4 The Hertogh tale circles around and around post-colonial minds because of what it threatened to reveal about vying religions in a colonial state. You will recall the reference made in the first chapter to Heidegger when he suggested that ‘the certainty of representational thinking’ is maintained by Christianity through cultural means long after it has lost what could be termed, direct political power.5 That’s what this chapter

96  Representing Christendom explores. In particular, why Christianity had a potent half-life in the late British Empire and how it achieved its influence are useful questions to answer. The colonial state often referred to administrative rulings suitable to Christianity or pro-Christian rulings in the court system as an indication of plurality because they were made outside of the local political despotism. They did not highlight browbeating readings of the Old Testament much less claim a fusion of state and church. Cultural cultivars of Christianity led history down the late colonial path. The Hertogh case is remembered due to the adverse consequences of colonial authorities in failing to accept or address Muslim religious and political sentiments as valid representations in their colony. The Hertogh riots were instructive because Muslim perceptions of colonial decisions needed to be managed carefully by the cultures of Christendom. No one has suggested that the blame-game played among senior members of the police force after the riot screened an enduring British claim to a single cultural Christian essentialism. In the 1950s, there were around 1.2 million Chinese, 217, 000 Malays, and 134, 000 Indians in Singapore.6 Within the Muslim Malays, there were a wide variety of ethnic groups and the same went for the Indians who were, unlike the Malays, predominantly but not overwhelmingly Muslim. Also unlike the Malays, the Indian sub-groups spoke a wide variety of vernacular languages that made it impossible for many of them to understand each other.7Across the diversity of Muslim Singapore, the Maria Hertogh story was well understood. It had a uniting quality whether you were a Peninsula Malay, a Tamil, a Sudanese, or an Achinese. Could there be anything more dramatic than an abandoned Dutch-Eurasian girl being brought up by a Muslim nanny being sought by her biological parents after several years of separation? This was a simple story with clear sides. The tale of Maria Hertogh had twists and turns. Maria was born into a Dutch-Eurasian Roman Catholic family in Java in 1937. In 1942, the occupying Japanese viewed her father, a soldier, as a Dutch imperialist. He was made a prisoner of war. Her mother answered the call to internment and, while awaiting the arrival of her four other children, placed Maria with an Indonesian nanny, Che Aminah, for safe-keeping in Kemaman, Trengganu. Her mother’s four children arrived at the camp but, due to the vicissitudes of war, Maria did not. Instead, she remained in the custody of the Nanny after the family repatriated to the Netherlands in 1945, leaving her parents to message the various Dutch Consuls and the Red Cross to keep an eye out for their lost daughter. Maria and Che Aminah were together for eight years. The Nanny and Maria eventually fell into the jurisdiction of British Singapore. Throughout November and December 1950 there were highly publicised and fractious custody matters before the local courts concerning what should happen to Maria after being separated from her

Representing Christendom  97 biological parents for so long. They were complicated by her secret marriage, when barely a teenager, to a young Muslim schoolteacher from Kalimantan, Inche Mansoor Adabi, who had an impeccable land-owning family. The marriage had the blessing of the local Muslim Malayan community led by Mr M.A. Majid. To the Muslim Malays of Singapore and the Malay Peninsula, great outrage was caused by the placement of Maria in the Catholic Convent of the Good Shepherd on Thomson Road to be cared for by the nuns for the duration of the various trials determining the custody issue. The Supreme Court of Singapore was besieged by angry Malay protesters throughout several procedural hearings into the matter in early December 1950. Maria often had to be spirited away through a side door due to the heartfelt effect of her plight on the assembled crowds. On 10 December 1950, the Full Court of the court of Appeal comprised of Chief Justice Sir Charles Murray-Aynsley, Justices Evans and Storr, upheld Justice Brown’s refusal at trial to grant a stay of the order for Maria to be returned to her biological parents.8 When before the subsequent Commission of Inquiry into the riots, the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Mr George Livett, was asked about the demeanour of the crowd awaiting news of the penultimate trial on 11 December 1950. He said that there was ‘a party of youths carrying banners and chanting Mohammedan prayers’ who were ‘slightly hostile and making the whole affair into a religious one’.9 To portray the crowd as unnecessarily conflating the secular legal case into an Islamic religious matter did nothing to exonerate the way colonial authorities handled the ensuing riot. By effectively denying the influence of cultural Christianity through the family courts, the aftermath was all about the ineffective police response, not the British reluctance to recognise the representations of Islam. An open letter by Mr Karim Ghani published in local newspaper Dawn framed the trial as ‘a case of Muslims vs. Catholics’ and warned that ‘the court in trying to establish its prestige should not become guilty of the contempt of the higher court of humanity and the still higher court of Judgement Day’.10 By framing the chaos as a failure in public management, the Commission of Inquiry could frame the riots as a case of the police not addressing the rising public agitations leading to the Hertogh riots either seriously enough or promptly enough. The certainty of representational thinking had to be British. Blaming the police for mismanagement of the public order problem was a small price to pay for not admitting doubt and to enable them to fill the colonial concourse with its people and their values. Nietzsche alluded to a similar idea when he proposed that morality was a theory of why a particular set of ‘dominant relations’ arises in life.11 Not only is dominance a question of colonial discipline among white and non-white colonial subjects, but it also refers to which moral code does the dominating. For Nietzsche ‘every specific body strives to

98  Representing Christendom become master over all space and to … thrust back all that resists its extension’.12 The will to power, was expressed by the resistance to conquest. This was the measure of a people and their inner fortitude. Although Nietzsche prefers the terms of an eternal arm wrestle between the conquerors and the conquered, this discounts the real possibility that the colonial power could misread the local situation or become complacent in their domination. The British authorities of Singapore were slightly shocked at how much the Muslim Malays in the colony saw the Hertogh case with solemn rage, and then violent anger. This suggested that the patronising colonial model was sorely in need of recalibration in recognition of the Muslim Malay and Indian resistance once it had surfaced openly. In the case of the Hertogh riots, the police officers misread the reaction of the Muslim Malays to a legal case being dealt with by Singapore’s court system. The senior police failed to recognise that sending in the Gurkhas at the earliest opportunity against the massing Supreme Court crowd was how colonialism nipped rival representational thinking in the bud. What the situation demanded, at least in retrospect, was a reflex of overwhelming military control grounded in Christian certainty. Its modus had to be confrontation/deflection, repeating in binary terms over and over again, until it felt like prerogative. This was the extent of selfknowledge gained by the British colonial administration of Singapore. It had not shown its prerogative. One academic contribution has suggested that the Maria Hertogh riots ‘laid bare’ colonialism in South East Asia and the response was ‘appeasement’ of the Muslim population in the wake of the riots.13 The aftermath was one of a Christian triumph offset by a range of counterpoint manoeuvres of the colonial government. These included refraining from blaming Malay police for failing to tackle the rioting, offering clemency to some rioters, and maintaining throughout that Maria's fate was a legal process, not a political one or aimed at religious victory. i.e. doubt in the colonial representation was strategically realised as a white policing failure, not the victory of the Christian God's image in the colony's family law. The sensitivity to the deep religious sentiments of Malay Muslims, and their preparedness on this occasion to call a colonial spade, ‘a colonial spade’, meant that a heavy-handed and determinative rush of colonial violence was – to the colonial mind in retrospect – the best possible response to the disturbances when the white pickets of containment and warning had failed and the cars were overturned and Europeans were beaten and left for dead in drainage ditches. On this theory, Muslim essentialism only understood a knockout punch. If it was not used, not only would the disorder bubble away and break out again, the colony would have two religious essentialisms vying for one political space. What was being said in the colonial review of the riots was that authorities that acted like they had power were taken to have the prerogative to use it. This narrow, fragile theory commended brutality in the heat of

Representing Christendom  99 the moment. Concessions were to be offered to the brutalised afterwards. Nietzsche's idea of the will to power did not include filling the space with violence and love in sequence, even if the love was as much an expression of British doubt and desperation as their delayed violence. The Christian cultural assumption of dominance was euphemised in phrases such as, ‘sending in the troops’, ‘nipping trouble in the bud’ or ‘public order management’. It was decided in the review of the riot response that only such action invoked the colonial state’s righteous certainty. A decisive rebuke was needed. Only was also a distinctively Christian word in this colonial context. Representation of authority was a singular concept with a white Christian prerogative. The will to power allowed colonial people to judge native people, and rule them accordingly, on the stamina and resistance to pain that they displayed. The resistance acculturated the representation of authority differently from one colony to another but did not have bearing on its singular nature or its refusal to be stymied. After Mr Livett, Mr K.L. Johnson, police superintendent of the Southern area of the colony, was next before the Commission as a witness to the Supreme Court disturbance. He recalled seeing Muslims raise the Pakistan flag and shout ‘this is our flag and we will only raise it once!’14 He characterised the crowd as having ‘a defiant attitude’.15 There were banners and lengths of cloth on which was written ‘we want Maria taken out of the convent’.16 In his testimony, out of a crowd of two or three thousand people only ‘about 80 seemed to be the core of the trouble Fanatics’17. He did not doubt that, had the Malay officers among the police acted that day as they had always before, none of the riots would have occurred. They did not act because ‘they were in sympathy with the Malays trying to get [Maria] back to Mohammadism’18. Johnson considered subsequent Supreme Court escalations ‘a very touchy situation as [the crowd] appeared to be religious Fanatics’.19 The day’s proceedings were rounded out by Mr Nigel Morris, Acting Deputy Commissioner in charge of the Central Intelligence Division (CID). Of the six senior officers who were later subject to disciplinary proceedings, he was the only one spared. This was presumably so because he was the Special Branch man at a point in time when the British government was in the thick of sustained counter-insurgency action against the Malayan Communist Party and its forces in the Malayan Races’ Liberation Army. He deposed that, on 7 December, he had told the Colonial Secretary of his ‘feeling’ that ‘this grievance would mount’.20 He also suggested that ‘some form of information might be given out to the public where obviously the lower ranks did not understand the true issues of this case which was purely a legal dispute’.21A speedy overwhelming (a 'nipping the matter in the bud') had not taken place. The next best thing would be to explain to Malays through the newspapers that taking a Muslim convert and putting her in a Catholic convent under armed guard for her protection formed part of a 'purely legal dispute'.22

100  Representing Christendom Morris had enjoyed a bet each way. By advising that confrontation of the Malays could be necessary OR that telling them that they were mistaken about the inference they made of the case, he was prepared to let the representation of Christian culture parade under another name. Uncompromising armed intervention would be termed 'necessary control' rather than smiting down, of course. But it did not in the event happen, as it should have done according to the Commission's findings, and the rioting only went from bad to worse as the purported result. An engrossing colony-wide dispute over religious paramountcy ensued. Calling it a legal custody matter being dealt with by a benign British court would slowly diffuse it. Surely ruling for the child's return to the Netherlands, justice would not be rushed. Malay religious sentiment over the Hertogh case could not have its essentialism, its sincerity, validated by the colonial state through a judicial result or, as events unfolded, by promptly making the streets run red until nothing moved. Perhaps the decisive fact was that Malay police officers were not prepared to shoot their people. In his evidence, Morris said he knew before the riots that ‘the Malay officers were not going to do their duty/had discontent and were deeply interested in this case’23. The pragmatic sense of the British colonial administration and its Commission was not to blame these Malay police officers. Instead, blaming its senior police officers complemented its line that the riots were not about religion but a mistaken idea that law was being carried by religion. We all make mistakes. In K.L. Johnson's testimony, the Commissioner of the Inquiry stepped in to correct him when he seemed to be falling off message about the role of the Malay police officers. He intoned that the refusal of Malay police officers to charge at rioters was: ‘A matter of passive resistance not active opposition to authority’.24 To this masterful deflection on the question of duty, Johnson replied: ‘Quite, Sir’.25 This refusal of the British Administration to fall into despotism, to find a target easy to blame and double down on it with disciplinary violence, suggests a crisis in colonial certainty prompting fresh efforts to hold the line. In this case, the best that could be hoped for was peevish forbearance. A black hole of doubt had nibbled away at the colonial solar system until, finally, all the heavens and earth went rattling down its cavernous maw. Along with forgiveness, overcompensation was also a sure sign of a disintegrating star system. Thirteen years old Maria Hertogh, pictured smiling cheerfully in English language papers, arm in arm with the nuns,

Representing Christendom  101 appeared to hold all the innocence and sincerity of an equatorial von Trapp daughter. Details were given about her discarding her sarong in favour of Western dress. Maria learned to knit while in the convent. She was also pictured beside her biological mother and kneeling beneath the statue of the Virgin Mary, something, according to the Straits Echo, she did ‘of her own free will’.26 None of this strident Christian positioning fell foul of the colonial government’s censorship controls on the press. The Hertogh legal decision had to be handed down on a day not too close to Christmas, for it would look like triumphalism, and not too close to Mohammed’s birthday, as that would incite violence through sheer insult. The representation of Christian certainty in the late British Empire had to avoid creating needless spite wherever possible for the cultural eddies of Christianity to surely prevail. The hardening of the British religious symbolism in the Hertogh case in Singapore in 1950 was the sort of misstep that the government could deflect as media-driven sensationalism or Muslim misunderstanding. The riot was an organic reaction to ripe sensitivities that had been mishandled by colonial authorities. The lesson of the riots was this: when colonial law and order became frayed, and Christian culture missed the opportunity for a knockout punch in the name of law and order, it went into stealth mode and called itself subjective ‘legality’. To the deep credit of the Malay Muslims of Singapore, the British were not allowed to get away with it entirely. That the British administration had to excuse Malay police for not acting, make overtures to murderous rioters, and discipline or jettison an entire generation of senior police for Maria to be returned to her Dutch Catholic parents, seemed a high price for it to pay. Yet, as Nietzsche reminded us, when ‘we…fabricated law’ as a part of ‘a world of symbols’ and insisted on treating it as a ‘thing in itself’ we indulged in ‘mythologising’.27 Maintaining the law as a device, a disinterested code available to resolve social disputes, seemed a benign exercise in governance. Investment in symbolic ethical ventures fell away in a crisis to reveal a colonial administration bent on economically skewing every opportunity in the unspoken name of Christian culture. God-invoking, whether denatured into minor rules and poured into law or let run as the representative expectedness of Christianity, diverted attention from the tendency to evil in colonial politics – the whole point of which was to avoid oversight, to get away with things. The inability of a colonial government to do anything positive with its impaired reputation came as the final shudder of doubt, for it had run naked too long seeking to disguise itself in false attributions of liability. The government had also taken cover beneath the heavy shade cast by induced civic sympathy. This shade shrank visibly under the equatorial sun on 11-13 December 1950.

102  Representing Christendom

Notes 1 Kassim, ‘Hertogh Stories Stir Nationalist Sentiment’, The Straits Times,10. 2 Kersten, Book Review Article, 363. 3 C-191119-002/VO-PV/003: Report of the Commission of Inquiry, [1]. 4 C-191119-002/VO-PV/003: Report of the Commission of Inquiry, [1]. 5 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 24. 6 Yap, Lim and Leong, Men in White, 593. 7 Yap, Lim and Leong, Men in White, 593. 8 ‘Maria Case Appeal’, The Straits Times, 7. 9 CO 953/46: Transcript of Evidence, Days 1–4, [3]. Note: the usages ‘Mohammadism’ and ‘Mohammadan’ appeared in the Commission’s transcripts from time to time. It is recognised that they are regarded by adherents of Islam as a misreading of their faith and have an offensive connotation. 10 Lee, Singapore: Journey into Nationhood, 47. 11 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 49. 12 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 636. 13 Aljunied, 'Rethinking Riots’, 130. 14 CO 953/46: Transcript of Evidence, [6]. Note: Another translation in the transcript was ‘This is our flag and we will die for it’. 15 CO 953/46: Transcript of Evidence, [6]. 16 CO 953/46: Transcript of Evidence, [10]. 17 CO 953/46: Transcript of Evidence, [14]. 18 CO 953/46: Transcript of Evidence, [20]. 19 CO 953/46: Transcript of Evidence, [20]. 20 CO 953/46: Transcript of Evidence, [23]. 21 CO 953/46: Transcript of Evidence, [26]. 22 CO 953/46: Transcript of Evidence, [26]. 23 CO 953/46: Transcript of Evidence, [28]. 24 Lee, Singapore: Journey into Nationhood, 45. 25 Lee, Singapore: Journey into Nationhood, 45. 26 Lee, Singapore: Journey into Nationhood, 45. 27 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 51.

Bibliography Aljunied, S.M.K. (2010) ‘Rethinking Riots in Colonial Southeast Asia: The Case of the Maria Hertogh Controversy (1950-1954),’ Southeast Asian Research 18(1): 105-131. Heidegger, The End of Philosophy trans. Joan Stambaugh (London: Souvenir Press, 1973). Kersten, Carool. (2010) Book Review Article: ‘SMK Aljunied, Colonialism, Violence and Muslims in Southeast Asia: The Maria Hertogh Controversy and its Aftermath,’ Contemporary Islam 4: 363-365. Lee Geok, Boi, Singapore: Journey into Nationhood (Singapore: Landmark Books, 1998). Nietzsche. The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1968). Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil trans R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990). Yap, Sonny, Lim, Richard and Leong Weng Kam. Men in White: The Untold Story of Singapore’s Ruling Party, 2nd edition (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2010).

Representing Christendom  103

Archival Singapore National Archive C-191119-002/VO-PV/003: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Disorders in Singapore of December 1950 (1951). CO 953/46: Commission of Inquiry Transcript of Evidence Vol. 1 No. 1 (Days 1, 2, 3 and 4) Before Chairman Sir Alfred Leach (14-17 February 1951).

Newspapers Kassim, Ismail. ‘Hertogh Stories Stir Nationalist Sentiment,’ The Straits Times (12 March 1989). ‘Maria Case Appeal’, The Straits Times (10 December 1950).

9 The Commission of Inquiry into the 1950 Singapore Riots (1951)

Nietzsche viewed the will to power as holding universal and unconditional characteristics. This chapter accordingly places the role of a commission of inquiry within the ruling expectations of a colonial government. The suggestion I make is that a commission can use the horrors of disorder to make the tyranny of foreign rule appear ‘necessary’ and ‘calculable’ in the lights of Nietzsche.1An assessment of reasons for the Hertogh riots expressed by local police officers is compared with the Commission of Inquiry's report findings. Its key recommendation, not to prosecute the conflicted Malay police who failed to do their duty in the riots, was the political price paid by the colonial government for the vestal salvation of the Hertogh daughter. This chapter demonstrates how the Commission of Inquiry contended itself as cutting off a riotous future with necessary concessions and, in doing so, made a claim for the necessary nature of colonial rule driven by the will to power. More importantly, the cares of the Christian colonial government and its Muslim Malay police were put at odds in the riot in a manner that neither wanted to see exacerbated. The Commission of Inquiry held its first hearings on the 14th and the 19th February 1951 in the Victoria Memorial Hall where it was 'to inquire into and report on the recent disorders in Singapore'.2 During the hearings of the Commission of Inquiry, the Acting Commissioner of Police, Mr Wiltshire, when asked whom the riots were against, took the view that the riots on the 11th of December appeared to be anti-police rather than anti-European or anti-Eurasian. He was also asked why the Malay police officers in the Beach Road area did not do their duty on the 11th December 1950. They had fired tear gas to disperse an angry crowd but had not, when required, pressed their advantage and charged at the crowd. There were other examples of rioting outside the Supreme Court and at the Sultan Mosque on the other side of town on the 11th of December. They were found by the Commission to be due to the ‘deliberate inaction’ of the rank and file of the Malay police and of ‘disobedience to orders’.3 When asked about this, Wiltshire replied that ‘not enough officers go to the canteens to get to know the uniformed Malay officers’ and that there were ‘not enough officers to instill discipline in the men’4.

The Commission of Inquiry into the 1950  105 The uniformed Malay officers faced a choice between community members and the echelons of white hierarchy.Their concern with and primary care for people of their community, was marked by their abstention from colonial hierarchy instead of enacting its will. Dialogue in a mistrusted racial hierarchy still had a validating effect on what and whom to have ‘concern’ with and ‘care’ about, in Heidegger’s terms.5 Yet, the handful of things that any person has care for determines where the spotlight of unconcealment lands and what truth is delivered. For the Malay police officers to care, they first had to be cared for by their white superiors. However, it cannot be said that the Commission of Inquiry was, itself, an unconcealment delivering-up truth. It instead delivered an invalid judgement for pragmatic reasons and encouraged all stakeholders to accept its validity. An earlier witness from the police, Mr Morris, had stated that the situation had clearly got out of hand by 4:15 pm on 11 December.6 Commissioner Wiltshire maintained that he agreed that a stone-throwing mob had become ‘inflamed’ after mistakenly believing the police had shot into the crowd at 1 pm near the Supreme Court, but he had no reason to tell the Colonial Secretary that the situation was beyond his control until 6:45 pm on the 11th of December.7 Morris and Wiltshire became a symbols of a broader police lethargy that needed correction. In its official findings, the Commission declared it ‘obvious’ that Commissioner Wiltshire had not appreciated the gravity of the situation or ‘realised the extent to which the Malay police had failed to do their duty’ throughout the day until the point of calling the Colonial Secretary and recommending the need for a military response to the rioting.8 The police had been too restrained in their use of the Ghurkas early in the day and Wiltshire had equivocated over the use of firearms to protect the North Bridge Road police station later in the day. Although the Commission’s liability findings were sufficient for Wiltshire to be retired early from the police force, that, however, was the extent of its findings against him. The Colonial Secretary was impliedly criticised by the Commission's findings. His actions and inactions could not, however, be debated in Council without the Governor's permission9 despite there being ‘a partial breakdown of civil Government and for three days of rioting no Government spokesman could or would say anything different’.10 One can analyse the findings relating to Wiltshire’s testimony and find them generally in service of the truth. Wiltshire underestimated the riots until it was too late. Another telling aspect of the report was its great detail on the question of deaths and casualties suffered by Europeans. The ‘worst of the outrages’ were described in some detail.11 The Commission did not merely target lawless behaviour but illustrated it with lots of white victim examples. These people had names, professions, and jobs. The colonial government might not have protected their lives but it would lead in their mourning. To whom did the colonial government

106  The Commission of Inquiry into the 1950 pitch itself as being necessary? Whites in the first instance took priority as its quid pro quo for not blaming its Muslim police officers (and inflaming the situation again). Telecommunications Department employee Mr H.J.A. Gutridge had his van stopped by 100 rioters in Rochor Canal Road where he was beaten to death with sticks and thrown in a canal where he died.12 RAF Warrant Officer Mr J.W. Davies, his wife, and daughter travelled in the Singapore Traction Company bus on North Bridge Road when he was dragged off and attacked by a crowd of rioters with sticks.13 He sought cover in a canal but was retrieved by the rioters and beaten again. He died in hospital two days later. His wife was assaulted but managed to escape; their daughter was spirited away by a Eurasian lady. In 1952, the attackers of Davies, the so-called Rochor Four, had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment for their part in the murder.14 Similar stories were told about other Europeans who found their deaths on the 11th of December 1950. All were stopped by rioters, seriously assaulted with bamboo sticks, and left for dead in canals. In the case of Mr H.P. Bell of the RAF, he was thrown into a canal and lit up with petrol by a rioter.15 Eighteen people died in the Maria Hertogh riots spanning from 11th to 13th of December 1950. The great bulk of deaths and injuries occurred on 11th December 1950. Although any death as the result of a riot is deeply lamentable, two Eurasians, five Chinese, two Indians, and three Malays died too. The circumstances of their deaths were not recorded by the Commission. Their details were not sought or were not, any of them, among the ‘worst of the outrages’.16 The question put to Acting Commissioner Wiltshire about whether he thought the rioting was ‘antiEuropean’ responded to the fact that five of the six European deaths occurred on the first day. Packs of stick-wielding Malays and Pakistanis, incensed at the Supreme Court shooting casualties, roamed the streets intercepting Europeans and bashing them with sticks. The results of the Commission of Inquiry: 1. The Malay police officers failed to do their duty but that was Acting Commissioner Wiltshire’s fault. 2. The rioters targeted Europeans and, although Commissioner Wiltshire did not see this in time, no finding was made on his fault. 3. Commissioner Wiltshire did not ask for military support to end the riotous behaviour and this meant that the riots continued when they should have been stopped. The effective finding that six European deaths were more important than the twelve deaths of other races, although dreadfully biased, was put in the report for the home crowd. It was justified by saying that the death reporting exclusively of the whites was because on the first day they bore

The Commission of Inquiry into the 1950  107 the brunt of the rioters' wrath. There are familiar offsets to anyone who has studied colonialism closely. The Muslim rioters were appalling but the government got ‘its girl’ in the convent back to her Christian home in the Netherlands. The Malay police officers were in dereliction of duty, but not responsible for deaths, and their dereliction was the responsibility of white police supervisors. From the colonial government's point of view, Europeans were the targets of the rioters. No political retaliation against the Muslim population was contemplated. The government had prevailed. The colonial government's care, as Heidegger foresaw, was a form of neglect. By only blaming partially, its 'care took care to leave something out'.17 The neglect of duty of the Malay officers highlighted a characteristic of ‘care’ in Heidegger’s thought in that ‘urges and propensities are not the results of external compulsions but ways that care manifests itself’18. In the moment of opting for neutrality when baton charging their brothers in faith was called for, the protective propensity of the Malay police was to side with the aggressors by not confronting them. The riots should have been stopped earlier by its senior police officers calling in the troops earlier. The approach of colonialism in this later period is seldom marked by push back against perpetrators or any attempt to check religious zealotry. Once colonialism became a case of holding on grimly, its Christian assertions remained desired outcomes, not by relating them morally to the failings and outrages of other people, but by trying to slide them under strife. Everything in the Commission of Inquiry was an exercise in tying up loose ends. It was a series of small quid pro quos. No noticeable slaps in the face except for the senior police officers. Their job? To take such treatment as part of their duty as they always had. The Commission had set itself up to unconceal to senior police officers what had been concealed. What is, the truth, ‘must be torn out of concealment and into history’, Heidegger said.19 Their failure to act decisively caused the riots to continue. Yet any colonial state can reveal a cause that is not the cause and line up evidence behind it accordingly. When Heidegger stated that one of the meanings of concealment was ‘something to which we have no possible connection’,20 the decision of a colonial government to unconceal focussed on those parties who were not unconnected i.e. those plausibly partly to blame who understood that it was in the nature of duty to accept all blame, or at least most of it. What gave away this position was mentioned in the previous chapter – Nigel Morris of the CID had escaped negative comments in the Commission because he was vital to the government through his role of intelligence gathering against the communists. Morris was not unconnected to the riots getting out of control, but he was too important to shoulder the blame. The government making unconcealment an impure process ignored his connection.

108  The Commission of Inquiry into the 1950 The decision of the colonial administration not to pursue fault among the rank and file of the Malay police was astute. They failed to do their duty on at least three occasions during the 1950 riots. It depended heavily on representations of necessary and proportionate colonial governance only available to the administration through the metaphor of law and broad interfaith manoeuvring to affirm the centrality of Christian prerogative. As Nietzsche observed, Christianity achieved ‘the eventual moralisation of debt/guilt and duty’.21 Charged with responsibility for the Christian cultural boulevard, the colonial government could relieve guilt and lapsed duty as freely as it could heap them on to political troublemakers or the hapless that crossed into its path. The Hertogh episode had an ongoing effect on the professionalisation of security forces and their public respect as non-partisan. Winston Choo, a retired Army Lieutenant recalled that during the July 1964 riots beginning on the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed, Malay, Chinese and Indian soldiers went out on security operations and ‘what race they were did not matter’.22 He was in a mixed regiment of Chinese and Malays stationed near Kampong Cilak. Although the ‘Chinese and Malays were at each other’ at the time, the regiment escorted women to go out to the market. In this task, there were ‘no racial conflicts’ with police or ‘challenge to soldiers’.23 This recollection found corroboration from Chelliah Tharumaratnam, the Secretary for the Ministry of Police at the time. He also recalled the Prophet Mohammed Birthday riot that ‘the police force of all nationalities kept cool-headed’ and the rank and file did not ‘take positions’ and there were ‘no accusations against them’.24 Nevertheless, 23 people were killed and 460 injured in a riot that broke out during a ceremonial procession commemorating the Prophet’s Birthday.25 There is always a risk of a golden past if there are personal or clan reasons to keep proclaiming it. Yet in the memories of retired participants, such a motive would seem absent. Trusting such recollections, the idea that the false witness of the British about Malay police to save their position in a tense moment led, a bit over a decade later, in the confidence of the riot responders and emergency services in the Chinese-dominated government of Lee Kuan Yew. They handled riots without resort to racialising their response for political points in the lead up to Singapore's separation in the mid-1960s. An untruth or lenience in applying moral prerogative over a duty not discharged, or a government’s decision not to prosecute despite having moral cause, can subsequently form a positive condition of life. Invalidly refraining from sovereign correction to allow disobedience to pass by had the effect of producing a valid tributary. Refraining from necessary action, and not flooding the field with the colonial will to power and its assertions of necessariness, reaped a bounty later. In the second riot of 1964, the government of Lee Kuan Yew was remembered by a journalist Seah Chiang Nee as 'cracking down heavily on the Chinese' rioters.26

The Commission of Inquiry into the 1950  109 Imagine such racial indifference a decade or so earlier! Public security had become a job to do, not an opportunity to impress racial discretion among the unruly.

Notes 1 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 52–53. 2 ‘Statement …the S’pore Commission of Inquiry’, The Straits Times, 2. 3 C-191119-002/VO-PV/003: Report of the Commission of Inquiry, [85]. 4 CO953/48: ‘Transcript of Evidence’, Days 8–10, [5]. 5 Heidegger, Being and Time, 118. 6 CO953/48: Transcript of Evidence, Days 8–10, [5] 7 CO953/48: Transcript of Evidence, Days 8–10, [8]. 8 C-191119-002/VO-PV/003: Report of the Commission of Inquiry, [68]. 9 ‘Riot Report Debate’, Straits Times, 6. 10 ‘Riot Report Debate’, 6. 11 C-191119-002/VO-PV/003: Report of the Commission of Inquiry, [83]. 12 C-191119-002/VO-PV/003: Report of the Commission of Inquiry, [83(i)]. 13 C-191119-002/VO-PV/003: Report of the Commission of Inquiry, [83(ii)]. 14 Aljunied, ‘Rethinking Riots’, 128. 15 C-191119-002/VO-PV/003: Report of the Commission of Inquiry, [83(iii)]. 16 C-191119-002/VO-PV/003: Report of the Commission of Inquiry, [83]. 17 Dahlstrom and Pippin, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, 134. 18 Dahlstrom and Pippin, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, 311. 19 Heidegger, Being and Truth,144. 20 Heidegger, Being and Truth, 144. 21 Acampora, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, 251. 22 AN002343: ‘Interview of Winston Choo’. 23 AN002343: ‘Interview of Winston Choo’. 24 AN001432: ‘Interview of Chelliah Tharumaratnam’. 25 Yap, Lim and Leong, Men in White, 593. 26 AN2709: ‘Interview with Reuters Journalist Seah Chiang Nee’.

Bibliography Acampora, Christa. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays (Lanham: Rowland and Littlefield, 2006). Aljunied, Syed Muhd Khairudin (2010) ‘Rethinking Riots in Colonial South East Asia: The Case of the Maria Hertogh Controversy (1950-1954),’ South East Asian Research 18(1): 105–131. Dahlstrom, Daniel and Pippin, Robert. Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990). Heidegger. Being and Time trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York, 1996). Heidegger. Being and Truth trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2010). Yap, Sonny, Lim, Richard and Leong Weng Kam, Men in White: The Untold Story of Singapore’s Ruling Party, 2nd edition (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2010).

110  The Commission of Inquiry into the 1950

Archival Singapore National Archive C-191119-002/VO-PV/003: Report of the Commission of Inquiry Into the Disorders in Singapore of December 1950 (1951). CO953/48: ‘Commission of Inquiry into the Riots of 1950 – Transcript of Evidence’ (Days 8, 9 and 10) 25 February 1951. NAS580/1999: AN002343: ‘Interview of Winston Choo’ (reel 1 of 3). NAS580/1999: AN001432: ‘Interview of Chelliah Tharumaratnam’ (reel 5 of 7). NAS580/1999: AN2709: ‘Interview with Reuters Journalist Seah Chiang Nee’ (reel 3 of 16).

Newspapers ‘Statement Issued by the Chairman of the S’pore Commission of Inquiry,’ The Straits Times (14 February 1951)

10 The KMT in British Malaya Failing Futurism (1950–1953)

In the early 1950s in Malaya, the KMT did not rally as its old guard had hoped. After becoming a proscribed organisation, it attempted to reorganise itself into anti-communist splinter groups and to keep its social networks through a plethora of chambers of commerce and clubs. It has been argued in this book that Heidegger’s admission of doubt that the representation of certainty replicated an invalid judgement in the Nietzschean contention ‘that must be believed to be true … even though it still might be a false judgement’.1 The KMT leadership thought that its internationalism could be maintained from Taiwan. It tried to act in the same way as the prodigious multinational corporation it had once been, and to do so without total reliance on a single, highly populous country as its home base and source of representative power. Mao Tse-tung’s government as it emerged in the early 1950s has often been criticized for not being conciliatory to the enemy in victory to form a national government including KMT elements. Nevertheless, China did not go cold turkey on the West. The West abandoned New China. Contrary to what one might assume, after 1949 the KMT Revolutionary Committee (KMTRC) continued in an abridged form in Mainland China as a ‘non-communist organisation’.2 It was established in 1948 by democratic elements of the former KMT who had opposed Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership.3 Li Chi-shen filled the role of its president and he became the Vice-Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress in 1954. Members of the KMTRC had to agree not to organise outside of major cities and had to agree with the CCP’s monopoly over the peasantry. Nevertheless, one report mentioned that ‘the continuing importance of the KMTRC … south of the Yellow River is evidenced by the fact that several of its leaders hold posts in the provincial and municipal administrations in that area’.4 The KMTRC maintained contact with the upper and middle-class elements that were historically associated with the Kuomintang. Outside of its home base in the southern and coastal provinces of China, the major KMTRC outposts were in Vietnam, Malaya, Indonesia, and Burma. I.e. Chinese bourgeois nationalists of a moderate

112  The KMT in British Malaya Leftist persuasion remained active after 1949 inside and outside of China. As non-anti-communist Chinese, they played emissarial roles for the CCP in British colonies. This demonstrated the surprising liberality in the CCP during the 1950s when there was a job to do. It was prepared to work with non-communist organisations. It was enough that such organisations were not anti-communist and were so for their own reasons. Other organisations inside communist-controlled Mainland China usurped the traditional role of the evicted bourgeois KMT. So worthy of belief was the stereotype of a Nationalist-aligned landlord fleeing to Hong Kong, that the CCP established the National Democratic Reconstruction Association (NDRA) in February 1950. This was a non-communist group in the central government tasked with ‘gaining the support of all industrialists and businessmen in China, Hong Kong, or overseas’.5 This organisation was given responsibilities to avoid post-civil war economic deterioration and finding foreign capital to ensure industrialisation did not falter. It was comprised of four groups: the bankers, the industrialists, the vocational educators, and a section devoted to the overseas Chinese. It had considerable independence from the central government, to the extent that the CIA praised its ability to 'spot attempted communist infiltration'6. Mao’s failure to secure concessions or support from Stalin in 1950 also contributed to the growth of power among NDRA’s non-communist membership because, as the CIA noted, they were ‘the only ones with experience and a following in finance and industrial production’7. The NDRA appears to be one of the great missed opportunities of the eastern Cold War. The State Department and the CIA perceived the organisation as one that ‘would like the clandestine economic support of the United States government’.8 This was to be achieved by ‘supposedly overseas Chinese money’ being used to buy Chinese government bonds and to hold the bonds in the party treasury.9 The CIA anticipated that ‘the US could enter the picture clandestinely and actually become the purchaser of factories all over China through overseas Chinese as front men’.10The US-led imposition of a trade blockade on China in 1950, and a collateral one on countries that traded with China, meant that the NDRA's plans came to naught. Immediately after the civil war, it was clear to the CCP that the brains and capital of the Old Society had fled the country to its detriment. The only appreciable contribution by the KMT after the Second World War, was to emphasise its continuing anti-communist credentials to scare the U.S. with the prospect that the Stalinist clique of the CCP would defeat the Nationalist bourgeois clique. China would become a Russian satellite. The same risk remained under Mao. Had the U.S. supported the NDRA it would have impliedly supported the overseas Chinese pro- KMT business types who had fled the communists. These interests, however, had no longer had skin in the game playing out in mainland China. No doubt they distrusted the projected independence of the NDRA too.

The KMT in British Malaya  113 I make no argument suspecting the economic recolonisation of China by the West in the 1950s; the Americans ignoring the NDRA was, however, a lost opportunity in using money to affect the politics of China – something that remained possible after its government became communist. The CIA’s support for the NDRA was overruled by the upper echelons of the U.S. government’s Department of State. Yet how could this optimism for post-1949 trade in China have a basis except as a huge misreading of where things were going in the country: 'The NDRA hopes to make a start attacking the economic deterioration and at the same time keep open some ties with the West'.11 Even worse than a CIA misreading, the no pasaran! politics of the bourgeois KMT after the Great Divide peaked in the early 1950s to the detriment of its business communities. It has limped on to form the lamentable basis of contemporary mass politics in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The Chinese communities of Singapore and Malaya were ridiculously factional about the politics of home. They had many expressions for homesickness; each with a slightly different meaning depending on the type and degree of preventedness. In fear of British colonial government proscription, some organisations used moderate third party political platforms to cover over extreme Leftist positions. Rightists were usually involved in organised crime legitimated by secret societies and their clannish rites. Such obscuring was hard to keep up. History specialises in prying at masks. Singaporean businessman Mr Tan Kah Kee sent a letter to President Truman in 1946 demanding that American forces withdraw from China and aid to the Central government be stopped. The ensuing controversy between the Leftists and the Rightists in the colony flushed several Left-leaning organisations out into the open. Once out there, one intelligence report noted: ‘the Left-wing organisations are merely using and exploiting the American issue as a means to increase their strength among the overseas Chinese’12. On a Heideggerian plane, Chinese political parties in colonial Malaya could through policy platforms make one representation or another, with a greater or lesser amount of doubt behind it. But it was in the outraged response to spontaneous controversies that true representations, based on the justice of a matter or the correctness of an assessment, which formed the bare politics of an organisation. Controversy drove unconcealment. This was how validity emerged and became re-enshrouded as well. Before 1949, the British government recognised the KMT ruling party of the Central Government of China. As one CIA report framed it, in Malaya, the colonial government was forced to ‘postpone and reconsider’ a proposal to offer citizenship to the colony’s Chinese population by ethnic Malay unrest.13 The KMT and the Central Government seized on this opportunity to ‘make efforts to unify’ the Chinese groups abroad, making ‘British control and restriction of KMT activities in Malaya … a delicate problem’.14

114  The KMT in British Malaya At the end of 1946, the policy of Chiang's government on Malaya was thought to be ‘on the offensive’ regarding minority Chinese rights in the colony.15The colonial government regarded the Chinese in Malaya as second-class citizens who were apt to be exploited by Chinese Rightists. American imperialism in China was used by the Left. At the heart of both unconcealments perhaps a sense of national affinity was being used to tug at the heartstrings. Inclusion in sovereign power, and preclusion from belonging to a unified polity, were both at stake. Heidegger and Nietzsche form a beguiled unity on this point. Nation, nationhood, and nationalism are false judgements believed to be true. They are historical drivers of unconcealment and reconcealment. The brief pivot to unconcealment experienced by the Chinese of Malaya included the truth that their race would be snubbed in the government of the decolonized nation. This prompted colonial political action to reconceal the truth that did not have to be convincing to be effectual. After 1949, the remnant colonial powers in South East Asia saw the pro-Chiang KMT as a weakened force that interfered without cause in the politics of other countries. This book’s Nietzschean argument – that credulity about invalidity was a driving force of politics – must, in the case of the KMT in the early 1950s, be said to have well and truly found its limits. Think about the comeback tour of an aging rock star or the misplaced faith of Yuan Shikai as if destined to be the venerated Emperor of China. Then we can better understand the projection of hope coming from the KMT in the early to mid-1950s. After 1945, the KMT’s political power, and its representative interpretation of itself, shifted from its tutelage of China – a matron disciplining unruly children – to a faux democratic model prescribed by its American donors. When the nation fell into the hands of the communist Chinese, the doubt of others, the communists and colonialists alike, made the KMT’s garish displays of plausibility flicker briefly and then conk out terminally. According to the testimony given before the Commission of Inquiry into the riots of 1950, Mr Wiltshire, Singapore's Acting Commissioner of Police, when asked whether any proscribed political organisation was responsible for the riot on the 11th of December, replied, 'Fortunately not, sir.'16 Neither the proscribed Malayan Communist Party (MCP), still smarting from several Special Branch blows in the weeks leading up to the riot, nor the KMT, still reeling from the exodus from China after 1949, played a significant part in the Maria Hertogh riots. There is no suggestion here that the pro-Chiang KMT organisation in Malaya and Singapore ceased to exist or that its former branch presidents in the overseas diaspora communities no longer took instructions from the Party’s Central Reform Committee in Taipei. The KMT always crept back like ivy. The British administration in Singapore knew this well and had, through the Special Branch, an impressive, ongoing operation steaming open mail and intercepting telephone calls to monitor

The KMT in British Malaya  115 former KMT representatives. At least one rather sloppily entered intelligence entry referred to 'a conversation overheard' suggesting that the Special Branch in Singapore were just concerned enough to follow an exKMT office holder to a café and listen for the views they volunteered.17 The unofficial Singapore leader of the KMT in the early 1950s was Mr Tan Kok Chor – an ethnic Chinese, born in Indochina. He managed a newspaper the Chung Shing Jit Pao that had 9000 copies in circulation. He was the only member of the KMT Central Committee in Singapore. As ‘the chief contact man’ in Singapore for the Taiwan government, he was the most active KMT agitator on the island.18 The newspaper quite brazenly published Taiwan propaganda circulars and on one occasion received US$5000 from Taipei for its expenses19. Tan took instructions in July 1953 from the KMT Central Reform Committee to adapt the ‘AntiCommunist, Resist Russia Committee’ to local legal conditions. Aware of the proscription threat posed by the colonial administration, if necessary it had to change its name and its objectives ‘in such a way as to enable it to run smoothly’20. In 1953, the CIA knew about the ‘recent upsurge of activity by the KMT in Singapore’ and overegged the puddling somewhat, by characterising it as coming from ‘a previously unknown Malayan Anti-Communist and Anti-Russian column’.21 Formosa (Taiwan) thought that the colonial administration's action in banning the committee was taken to avoid ‘an awkward issue’ at a time when the Kaesong truce talks after the Korean war were being commenced.22 The British colonial government did not want to have to account to China and Russia why a nationalist Chinese organisation in its colony was making waves. The KMT had ceased to exist in Singapore as an organised body although the fabric of the branches continued. It did so with a lack of cohesion through the clubs and associations. The number of members remained stable. One report explained that there were 'the diehards' and others highly critical of the KMT regime's past corruption and inefficiency.23 There was a Veteran Clique thought to be ‘hibernating’ as well as the Younger Set ‘restive and itching’ for something to be done.24 At last, something was done. In November 1952, Chiang Kai-shek launched an initiative to raise US$100 million from the 12,000,000 Chinese living outside of China of whom 90 per cent were in South East Asia.25 They were asked to join the Overseas Chinese Salvation Association. There was a big conference in Taipei with over 200 Overseas Chinese from 23 countries. The whole affair was sponsored by the KMT. Now that the decimated KMT regime in Taipei had itself joined the diaspora ranks of the Overseas Chinese, it was only natural that it led this vital, new AntiCommunist Front and benefitted most from its activities! The KMT's renewed internationalism as if it had retained a national Chinese government mandate that had consequence was not only wishful thinking, its timing was appalling. The Three Antis and Five Antis

116  The KMT in British Malaya campaigns were underway in Mainland China between 1951 and 1953. Their avowed aim was to censure citizens deemed too close to capitalist influences, as well as capitalists themselves involved in double-dealing under government contracts. This major political consolidation resulted in CCP benefit from foreign exchange falling so dramatically that farmers were asked to write to their overseas relatives asking for ever greater amounts of money to help villages to make ends meet during the contraction of capital. The letters, once subjected to censorship, were sent to an emissary in Macau or Hong Kong where there was a cash transfer made over the border in response to a bona fide provision of goods or services.26 Therefore, the moment that the KMT Central Committee in Taipei had chosen to squeeze Overseas Chinese was the same as the moment the Communists had taken. The centrality and the mission of the KMT to fight communism by levying overseas communities had to be acted on by party members not as if such objectives were real – in the Cold War they were – but rather as if the KMT was the organisation to achieve such objectives. In October 1953, according to British intelligence reports, Tan Kok Chor was still harping on about the KMT’s desire for permission to fly the Nationalist flag on the occasion of the Double Tenth celebrations (the old nationalist holiday on 10 October). His justification had resonance in Singapore and Malaya, which at the time, continued to deal with the armed insurgency of the Malayan Communist Party and its Malayan Races’ Liberation Army (MLRA). Tan claimed that raising the old flag ‘would give local Chinese an opportunity to demonstrate their repudiation of Communism’.27 Tan mentioned that the ‘Celebration Committee’ had decided that the Chinese Chamber of Commerce would hold a ceremony and party on the Double Ten.28 Chan Ying Tsing, former KMT Secretary of the Perak State Branch, found himself in a similar position to Tan. He was advised by Taipei to use the Double Ten celebrations for anti-Communist and anti-Soviet propaganda and to try to get local government heads to attend celebrations ‘who are local Chinese leaders but not KMT, but supporters of it, so that celebrations can be given a popular Chinese feeling and not confined to the KMT.’29 The fate of the KMT in Malaya post-proscription was characterised by such inveigling and positioning, not only concerning the Chinese community but also a wary British administration. The ability of the KMT to proclaim a shared common ground with the British against communism cost its anti-imperialism credentials very little because, as Cavendish pointed out, they had always been a 'thin…veneer over the nationalism beneath'.30 The natural constituency of the KMT, the warlords, the bureaucrats, the compradors, and local bullies who Cavendish called ‘the parasites of imperialism’ saw after the May 4th movement that the evil of foreign influences could be attached easily to class division as the biggest problem in China and that this‘really fastened hold on Chinese political opinion’.31 It said much about the parlous state of KMT

The KMT in British Malaya  117 nationalism in the diaspora populations that the British administrations in Singapore and Malaya, even in their declining years, did not need its anti-communist impetus. The KMT had become a fragmented sideshow clinging on in Taipei, colonial business clubs and Burmese jungles. The party leadership seemed unaware of the depths of its failure or the impossibility of a comeback. A marvelous example of this comes from Issue No. 1 of the Hot Blood News produced by the former Secretary of the Penang branch of the KMT, Mr Yeap Kok Chen. His article in the paper concerned China’s ‘disgrace' at not being invited to take part in the San Francisco Treaty formally ending the war with Japan.32 He stamped his foot and called for protests to be made on the 3rd of September 1953 against ignoring Nationalist China in the peace treaty conference. Apart from Chiang becoming a pariah on the international stage, the Sook Ching massacre in Singapore led by the Japanese against KMT Chinese in early 1942 had been effective enough locally not to leave vengeant remnants capable of demanding international recognition. An up and coming Scot, Rawle Knox, a newspaper correspondent in Singapore, suggested that, to many Westerners, it seemed folly to appeal to Malayans to resist communism. At the same time, the colonial government sought to 'cut them off from the only Chinese group that declares itself ready and willing to fight Communism – the KMT'.33 The British line on this chose weasel words. It was imperative for Malaya upon independence to be free of the influence of any Chinese government for the sake of governance in South East Asia. In this, the British constructed a version of the Domino Theory about communism ten years ahead of its time, but no more accurate than its American incarnation, while paying lip service to the KMT. The KMT regime in Taiwan maintained itself through narcotic smuggling in South East Asia to world markets. It needed to trumpet its anticommunist creed because it was a license to make money. The British had gone back, through intermediaries, to licensing opium 'farms'. Why else was there a report of KMT guerrillas operating in Northern Perak in 1951 mysteriously subject to ‘communist overtures’?34 Why else would the British colonial government 'suspect that this was specifically concocted to induce the Government to a lenient attitude towards the guerrillas'?35How much was the 'farm' (i.e. drug licence) worth to keep the bogeyman communists away? A lot to the KMT, presumably, but not much to the colonials. It was enough to tolerate a Rightist army battalion on their sovereign territory provided that it stuck to its remit of drug protection and transport. If the British in the 1950s felt confident to call out your sham, you were an objectively hopeless case. The KMT had been reduced to jungle drudgery. It was still capable of greasing the wheels for the fragile approval from the Americans. They were already fighting on too many fronts to monitor closely who fought in their place.

118  The KMT in British Malaya The KMT confined itself to playing a sporadic role as America’s nihilistic freedom fighters in the southern China borderlands because it was a spent force as an instrument of international relations. Remarkably, the Americans, after bankrolling decades of pre-1949 KMT corruption in Mainland China, could still be irritated by the presumption and overreach of the KMT’s Cold War shenanigans. The British proscribed the KMT as an illegal organisation. Then they superintended their vernacular schools and athletic clubs and waited for their application to fly their bold but meaningless flag on a day that only means something to historians. All the Powers played around the edges, and made strategic use of idiots, of course, but no one was really listening to the KMT abroad anymore. Its reports that the Communist Chinese were exploiting dependants of those trapped in China raised no eyebrows in colonial South East Asia. Nor did stories of Communist espionage and assassination operations in the South China Sea region that were thought by the British to be 'little more than a studied propaganda campaign'.36 Oddly, the Americans had an enduring and sentimental affinity for Taipei and its offers of help from diaspora agents, or as Leonard Cohen once put it, asked to ‘dance me to the end of love’.37

Notes 1 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 42. 2 CIA-RDP78-00915R000600210003-9: ‘The United Front’, 18. 3 CIA-RDP78-00915R000600210003-9: ‘The United Front’, 27. 4 CIA-RDP78-00915R000600210003-9: ‘The United Front’, 18. 5 CIA-RDP82-00457R004500250001-8: ‘Relationships within the CCG’, [8c]. 6 CIA-RDP82-00457R004500150007-3: ‘NDRA’, 2. 7 CIA-RDP82-00457R004700340009-1: ‘Non-Communists in the CCG’, 1. 8 CIA-RDP82-00457R004500150007-3: ‘NDRA’: [2]. 9 CIA-RDP82-00457R004500150007-3: ‘NDRA’: [2]. 10 CIA-RDP82-00457R004500150007-3: ‘NDRA’: [3]. 11 CIA-RDP82-00457R004500150007-3: ‘NDRA’: [2]. 12 CIA-RDP82-00457R000200070015-0: ‘Chinese Activities (Malaya)’, 1. 13 CIA-RDP78-01617A002800100004-6: ‘Chinese Minorities in South East Asia’, 4. 14 CIA-RDP78-01617A002800100004-6: ‘Chinese Minorities’, 4-5. 15 CIA-RDP78-01617A002800100004-6: ‘Chinese Minorities’, 6. 16 CO953/48: Commission of Inquiry Transcript of Evidence, Days 8-10, 4. 17 CO537/7292: PMR 9/1951: ‘Strength and Activities of KMT’ (1951-1953), [59]. 18 CO 537/7292: PMR 9/1951: ‘The Strength and Activities of the KMT’, Appendix F. 19 CIA-RDP82-00457R005200440005-5: ‘Relations Betw. KMT’, [1]. 20 CO 537/7292: PMR 9/1951: ‘The Strength and Activities of the KMT’, [59]. 21 CIA-RDP82-00457R005200440005-5: ‘Relations Betw. KMT’, [3]. 22 CO 537/7292: PMR 9/1951: ‘Strength and Activities’, [60]. 23 CO 537/7292: PMR 9/1951: Appendix F. 24 CO 537/7292: PMR 9/1951: Appendix F. 25 CO1022/198: Rawle Knox, ‘Kuomintang Appeal to Overseas Chinese...’, 2.

The KMT in British Malaya  119 6 CO1022/198: Rawle Knox, ‘Kuomintang Appeal’, 2. 2 27 CO 537/7292: PMR 9/1951: ‘Strength and Activities’, [61]. 28 CO 537/7292: PMR 9/1951: [61]. 29 CO 537/7292: PMR 9/1951: [62]. 30 Cavendish, ‘Anti-Imperialism in KMT’, 28. 31 Cavendish, ‘Anti-imperialism in KMT’, 29. 32 CO 537/7292: PMR 9/1951: ‘Strength and Activities’, [63]. 33 CO1022/198: ‘Activities of the KMT in the Federation’, [3]. 34 CO537/7292: PMR 9/1951: ‘Federation of Malaya’, [3a]. 35 CO537/7292: PMR 9/1951: ‘Federation of Malaya’, [3a]. 36 CO537/7292: PMR 9/1951: ‘Strength and Activities’, [50]. 37 Cohen, ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ lyrics.

Bibliography Cavendish, Patrick. ‘Anti-Imperialism in the Kuomintang,’ in Jerome Ch’en and Nicholas Tarling (eds), Studies in the Social History of China and South East Asia: Essays in Memory of Victor Purcell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil trans R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990).

Archival Hong Kong Public Records Office (Kwun Tong) CO537/7292: PMR 9/1951: ‘The Strength and Activities of the Kuomintang’ (1951-1953). Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Reading Room CIA-RDP78-01617A002800100004-6: ‘Chinese Minorities in South East Asia’ (2 December 1946). CIA-RDP82-00457R000200070015-0: ‘Chinese Activities (Malaya)’ (13 December 1946). CIA-RDP78-00915R000600210003-9: ‘The United Front in Communist China (1 May 1957). CIA-RDP82-00457R004500250001-8: “Relationships of Individuals and Groups within the Chinese Communist Government” (15 March 1950). CIA-RDP82-00457R004500150007-3: ‘The National Democratic Reconstruction Association and its Relationship to the United States’ (21 March 1950). CIA-RDP82-00457R004700340009-1: ‘Increase in Importance of NonCommunists in the Chinese Communist Government’ (19 April 1950) 1. CIA-RDP82-00457R005200440005-5: ‘Relations Between the Overseas Department of the Kuomintang and Chung Shing Jit Pao’ (12 June 1950).

Singapore National Archive CO953/48: Commission of Inquiry into Riots of 1950 Transcript of Evidence Days 8-10 (25 February 1951). CO1022/198: ‘Activities of the KMT in the Federation of Malaya and Singapore’: Rawle Knox, ‘Kuomintang Appeal to Overseas Chinese to fight Communism’ The Scotsman (13 November 1952).

120  The KMT in British Malaya CO1022/198: ‘Activities of the KMT in the Federation of Malaya and Singapore’ (13 November 1952).

Online Sources Leonard Cohen. (2020). ‘Dance Me to the End of Love,’ lyrics (Published: unknown) Available at: https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/545305/Leonard+Cohen/ Dance+Me+to+the+End+of+Love (Accessed October 4 2020).

11 Lee’s Favourite Communist, Singapore (1956–1969)

From 1956 until 1969, Mr Lim Chin Siong faced an ongoing ultimatum to renounce his communist politics or face indefinite detention in Lee Kuan Yew’s prison system. A debate has raged since Lim's death in 1996 whether he was a true Singapore radical or an arch-communist. No matter if he was either – or merely a defamed Leftist moderate – Lim was greatly misunderstood, and purposefully so. A more interesting question than Lim’s true stripes was how the will to power operated in Singapore to oust communist influence in the years preceding its final rejection of merger and its decision to separate from Malaysia. Singapore's Superhuman communists breached a ceiling in allowable cares in public life. The eternal return of the Internal Security Act (ISA) demanded their repentance. Like Icarus, the communists had no one to blame but themselves. Lim spent several years in prison and was finally allowed to go overseas to England for education in 1969 (doing a series of menial jobs to sustain himself). He returned to Singapore to play no role in politics. During his incarceration, he was given several opportunities to repent his communism but nothing came of several years of disavowal. Lee Kuan Yew toyed with Lim. Lee loved him captive. His incarceration was an example of Lee advancing a culturally-based Christian ethic imbibed from colonial experiences. Seeking Lim’s humiliation was a form of transferred guilt requiring repentance addressed to no one. It became evident as a theme of life throughout the semi-occupied, merged, and separated eras of Singapore’s history. Nietzsche distinguished between debt guilt, which disappears after a loan was repaid and moral guilt for acts done that lingers around the forgiven for years after punishment occurs.1 If, at the coming of mass atheism, guilt disappears it would be because no debt is owed to God. Moral guilt can remain, however, without it being owed to someone. Nietzsche termed this the ‘moralisation of guilt’2 i.e. affective moral guilt that needs no mortgagee of thunder and brimstone that acts in psychological oppression. It is in this connection, the insinuation of the shameful wrongness of communism or appeals to individual conscience about its barbarous creed, that this chapter approaches Lee Kuan Yew’s efforts in policing communists in Singapore (1956–1969).

122  Lee’s Favourite Communist In this story, Lim Chin Siong is the star. His prison stints, and the pressure tactics placed on him to moderate his thinking into an acceptable politics, suggest that the People’s Action Party (PAP) conditioned in the public sphere an idea of what Singapore had to do to be successful. It was idle talk of mediocre intelligibility. This also invoked Nietzsche’s idea that, once ‘the shabby origin’ of the ‘supreme values’ put above human heads becomes known, humanity must somehow recover from the resulting ‘meaninglessness’.3 How the PAP moderates navigated meaninglessness by using a faux assault on communist ideas is a worthy question for philosophical history. PAP had to normalise and slot in its own basebuilding measures in seeming defiance of Kuala Lumpur’s central government, while not offending the generally continuing British tutelage either. As early as 1959, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) knew that Lim Chin Siong was not its man. He had worrying tendencies. In an internal memo, he was declared to be ‘the top pro-Communist leader in the leftwing of PAP’.4 Then aged 28, he was described as ‘highly intelligent’ and ‘an effective political leader’.5 This charismatic young politician had been arrested for subversion in 1956 and not released until the PAP came to power in June 1959. His main support base lay among the blue-collar elements of the trade unions, which was regarded as the most militant sector of organised labour. The CIA observed that ‘Lim is not a rabble-rouser’ but rather a ‘softspoken skilful operator’ whose major assets included his youth, wide popular appeal, and a record of agitation against the British colonial administration of Singapore.6 Lim was recognised as ‘a hero of Chinese youth and closely identified with the Chinese speaking masses’7 whereas Lee Kuan Yew had ‘relatively poor Chinese’ which made a ‘close relationship to Chinese speaking masses difficult’8. Moderate PAP policies were positioned just above communist heads, and those of the community generally, as the only workable values to guide Singapore. PAP saw itself as a pro-development, welfare safetynet party. It sought approval and support from a business aristocracy it had a hand in making. After the horrors of Japanese occupation, it propagated such principles that could not, in Nietzsche’s usage, be seen as ‘hard’ on people because of their high moral character and therefore ‘exacting a high price’.9 Nietzsche considered that ‘obsolete Christian value judgements are ubiquitous in Socialistic and positivistic systems’.10 This approaches Nietzsche’s obsession with exalted individualism. As Russell observed, ‘it never occurred to Nietzsche’ that the lust for power in the Superhuman embodiment ‘is itself an outcome of fear’.11 The indulgent redistribution of wealth in PAP’s platform aimed to calm Singapore by moderating its post-war inequality and condition its predominantly Chinese population to separate nationhood. This was not a case of conquest and overlordship based on fear. It was retraction from a greater polity from fear of being swallowed up or dominated by it.

Lee’s Favourite Communist  123 PAP performed its mild inversion by making a moral orthodoxy out of mediocrity and volunteerism, or as I term it, a finely calibrated nationalism of reasonableness. PAP kept, and still keeps, meaninglessness at bay by never declaring a moral level beyond its ability to achieve. Reasonableness, and encouraging a perception of PAP’s ownership of it in the public square, can also be called free-standing moralised guilt in no need of a God or priestly shock troopers to enforce its feeling among people. This is has become the reasonableness of anthem lyrics, compulsory military service, speaking English, vast public housing projects, and hawkers putting good cheer in the air through their aromas. In the 1960s, reasonableness concerned the question of how to stop a group of breakaway, pro-communist politicians and convince the population that they had gone too far. The will to power in this context shined through in the continuation by PAP of an extended colonial anti-Communist policy. Footlights such as public housing and public transport infrastructure were also important. It centred on stripping political initiative from the pro-communists through sedition trials and imprisoned ultimatums. Controlling the narrative of reasonableness allowed PAP to manage a bandwidth of politically acceptable ideas and alienate anyone who did not subscribe to them. It made the lives of Left-wing members of PAP impossible. In 1963, in the tussle to represent reasonableness, PAP had to check the rise of a breakaway opposition party from its ranks, Barisan Sosialis (BS). Not only did this make PAP appear menacing on the eve of Singapore's decision about the merger with Malaysia, for a while it made the merger appear to be the reasonable move to make. The reading of the CIA on BS in 1962 was that its ‘Communist oriented leaders … face almost certain arrest if the merger of Malaya, Singapore and British Borneo is carried out as projected… and has been attempting to rouse Singapore’s overwhelmingly Chinese population against the merger’.12 Having cofounded BS, this referred to Lim Chin Siong. Although not against the merger, BS advocated for voters to return a blank ballot because all three options they were presented with would be bad for Singapore. Not long after the vote in favour of the merger occurred, Lim was imprisoned in 1963. He was referred to in a local newspaper in 1965 as ‘the most important open-front Communist leader in Singapore’13. This could only be taken as an attempt to make him notorious, an ever-present threat to reasonableness, on the eve of Singapore’s subsequent separation after the merger proved too much for it. Although Lim had attempted to hang himself, gone on a hunger strike, and was psychologically broken, he still maintained value as Singapore’s number one bogeyman that was urged to see the error of his ways through the eyes of reasonableness. The PAP moderates dictating this policy seemed to be picking up where colonialism left off. Its patchy divine insistences left behind fat books full of dos and don'ts fit for a young country seeking its defining edges.

124  Lee’s Favourite Communist The release from prison in 1971 of Lu Shu Shiang, BS propaganda section chief, was triggered by publicly-made acts of repentance. He ‘renounced his past connections with communism’.14 He said ‘he now detested communism and those who had misguided him’.15 He topped this off by saying ‘I am deeply grateful to the government for its considerate and benevolent policy of patiently correcting our misguided thoughts with convincing arguments backed with material facts and hence putting me back on the right path again’.16 Lu’s prescription ‘henceforth, I will be law-abiding and patriotic’ sounded like the moralised guilt could be cast off or that it was akin to a debt that had been repaid.17 It was usually accompanied, however, by a promise from a released inmate not to run for public office under a communist party affiliation.18 This confirms that the suspicion of communism lingered even after it had been renounced: it was moralised guilt that could never quite be dispersed. Not everyone detained as a communist accepted the moralisation of guilt or that his or her remorse should be addressed to Singapore at large. After 22 years of detention Malayan Communist Party (MCP) cofounder and BS infiltrator, Chia Thye Poh refused to renounce his communist politics. He was released to a state of purgatory on Sentosa Island where he could live in a house and be with his family but not move freely around Singapore.19 Chia refused to renounce the use of force to overthrow the governments of Singapore and Malaysia or renounce the MCP. By 1989, his militancy could have been that of a broken, washed-up man. His cause had long since expired. He wanted to believe through his unrepentant position that his life had not been wasted. Or, bloody-minded, Chia simply refused to give the Singapore government what it wanted and what it had waited so long for. If he fell into this category, and was in an eternal war of wills between him and the Singapore government, at least the guilt had no place to land, no shame to magnify, no skin to cling to in the future. Singapore's defence and foreign affairs policy remained filtered through the British, who retained military bases in Malaysia and Singapore until 1971. It was as though they sat in an office, within an office, safely behind drywall, their telexes and typewriters still audible and pumping out missives about what would or would not be reasonable, in their view. This passed for de facto rule despite Malaysian Merdeka in 1957, the brief years of Singapore and Malaysia merger after 1963, and Singapore's final separation in 1965. Not counting BS, and the stiff political and military resistance offered by the outlawed MCP from 1947 to 1962, the semi-occupied region had four contenders for authority: Lee Kuan Yew, the Tunku Abdul Rahman in Malaysia, as well as the British military and diplomatic vanguards. In Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew led the PAP in a crusade seeking the sincere repentance of the communist leaders he imprisoned in Changi Prison, Woodbridge Mental Hospital, and Queenstown Prison. In this, he was

Lee’s Favourite Communist  125 merely an observer for sincerity. He was a gatekeeper who roused reasonableness as a means of its measurement. He spoke for it but was not owed it. This drive sought to appeal to and consolidate the old local Chinese business elites of Singapore as well as a selection of vetted KMT refugee business types seeking to establish roots after fleeing the Chinese civil war in 1949. Appearing tough on communists was good for political stability and the entrepreneurial coalition in whose name the PAP sought to rule. Yet this toughness sought contrition from communists as if truly offering rehabilitation from carceral radicalism to acceptability. Even if a few imprisoned communists tried to commit suicide or go on hunger strikes to assert the injustice of their predicament, such acts reflected their lack of power to PAP. Nevertheless, the idea of the will to power concerns the strength of resistance as an indicator of character. The PAP could only punish the communists in a way that reflected its lack of a strong constituency. It covered this over by moralising the guilt of the communists and ignoring their hold-out tactics as a marker of virtue. It wanted to avoid provocation of the increasingly leaderless blue-collar element of Singapore, and perhaps even appeal to it, so it wanted repentance and personal guarantees from its fallen prisoners, not their martyrdom. The will to power in the PAP moderate context had no lack of raw ambition to create an aristocracy of Lee Kuan Yew’s choosing. Yet its methods were constrained by a variety of other Leftist interests that shaded into public welfare and volunteerism. Even in the 1960s, the party was concerned about what it might do if the shoe was on the other foot. This had been the case in 1957 when the moderates briefly lost control of the party to the pro-Communists. The constant threat to its power led to an inability to take absolute action without the tacit approval of others in upright trade unions or other social welfare organisations. Without such bracing, there could be no acting as a confessor-messenger to its enemies or co-opting the politics of reasonableness. As PAP had constraints on the extrajudicial killing of homegrown open front communists, its rank and file would not go to jail themselves, or be unnecessarily heroic. This absence of fortitude to prosecute their case at personal costs was suggested by British records from 1965. If PAP moderates lost control of the Assembly, or Lee Kuan Yew was arrested by the Malaysians for treason, the plan was to hold a general strike and proclaim the independence of Singapore. In a final reckoning, the PAP leadership would flee and set up an émigré government in either Phenom Penh or Cairo.20 Nietzsche took no pains to disguise the will to power as an elitist, antisocialist, and aristocratic idea. It found a powerful demonstration in the politics applied to progressive open front communist leaders throughout the early to mid-1960s in Singapore – many of whom were tried before the courts for sedition. Through police interrogations, PAP would offer

126  Lee’s Favourite Communist political rivals an essentially colonial opportunity to publically recant and keep quiet in the future or face the consequences. This was a chanceless politics that did not use the threat of the noose but rather of perishing on eternal remand. In one case, two pro-Communist members of parliament accused the PAP regime of ‘plotting to murder’ Lim Chin Siong when he was a political detainee.21 One trade unionist called as a witness to this sedition trial, Ho Peow, said that police officers questioning him had ‘recently told him that he would have to conform to the general situation in Singapore’ and that ‘they told me I had to appear on television and also issue a statement, satisfactory and acceptable to the government or I will be in prison for a lifetime… I will rot in prison, they said’.22 The divide-and-rule colonial methods of PAP toward two imprisoned BS MPs, as well as Lim Chin Siong, and Ho, were commonly used. In its attempts to sew discord in jail among the inmates, on one occasion it maintained that Ho had called Lim Chin Siong ‘a coward’.23 Ho refuted this under oath, saying that there was 'no truth' to the suggestions of differences between them, ‘no dispute’ between them and that he regarded Lim ‘as a very nice man’ and ‘the leader of the strongest leftist opposition in Singapore’.24It was easy to see the paralysis of PAP in its infuriation at these communists who would not crack, despite its threats. One condition for Singapore to renounce the merger and separate from Malaysia in 1965 imposed by the slowly departing British forces included a cleanout of Singapore politics to ensure its communists were wounded and marginalised to a point where there could be no comeback. Lee Kuan Yew also had to secure political backing from the business classes. Above all, PAP’s will to power was fancied as anti-nihilist but that, as Nietzsche explained, ‘we must first experience nihilism before we can determine what [our greatest values and ideals] were actually worth’25. This was not to suggest that nihilism was resisted by every political party to find out what is real and what is not. Nor was this to say that the modern Republic of Singapore, resplendent with its incorruptible corporate permissions and eternally revolving ancestral throwbacks, is some sort of ideal or a model that can be emulated or admired. The experience of nihilism has to do with a knowledge of an extreme, forcing a political party to gather a synthesis of moral positions it feels comfortable with, and this process was complicated by a recent taste of colonialism and merger ambitions with Malaysia. An elite that is intent on using a false metaphysical contention to protect its position may resist nihilism. Nietzsche framed this as an argument that, because our illusory world fails to reach its ideals, it cannot rely on a metaphysical explanation as to its cause and therefore it cannot be true.26 Nihilism practised as scepticism about the role of public morality was central to the communist ethic of BS in the early 1960s.

Lee’s Favourite Communist  127 PAP wanted to stake its authority to define what was true for Singapore. This made public derision of its policies as Socialism Lite unacceptable. No matter how questionable its electoral support had always been, its proportional punishment for speaking out of turn was sufficient for it to hold sway. PAP attacks on Barisan Sosialis were a way to assure gracefully departing British that they would not leave their prized possession as a quagmire of radicalism and instability. i.e. by positioning itself as the redeeming party in the eyes of others, PAP could discourage the opposition BS as if its disappointment over the opposition’s lack of unified purpose came from a moral place. It did not, of course. BS could not lack both political viability and be entirely blameworthy for riotous instability during the Malaysian merger and separation. Lee was depicted by the CIA in 1959 as ‘brilliant’ and ‘highly intelligent’ but a weak leader: ‘some [of his] very radical statements probably made to gain public support, maintain working relationship [with] extremist wing [of the] party.’27 The bottom lines for the CIA in 1959 were (1) that ‘radical rule’ of Singapore would have ‘an adverse effect’ on the Federation of Malaya and the prospects of merger and (2) there was a risk that ‘extremist take-over’ would provoke the British to revoke the transitional constitution and resume direct rule.28 It was true that the leftwing members of PAP, later to form BS, distinguished between a 'genuine' and a 'fake' merger. The fake merger was one not designed to give real independence to a co-equal Singapore in a greater Malaysia because it was British-inspired. Nietzsche argued that once categories including ‘unity’ and ‘purpose’ could no longer be clung to, the result was that worthlessness proliferated.29 This recalls Heidegger’s work on ritual constancy in maintaining the truth of a representation. The schismatic currents running through PAP for most of the early 1960s seemed to those in Lee Kuan Yew's faction to open the party to a question about its purpose. It was at the threshold of some of the most important questions facing Singapore such as the merger with Malaysia and the threat of Indonesian influence. Aligning pro-communists in PAP with a species of nihilism associated with a lack of unity and purpose, Lee Kuan Yew drove home a fatal wedge on 20 July 1961. He introduced a motion of confidence in the government led by him. After 14 hours of debate, 27 out of 51 voted in favour of him. Among the 24 members who did not vote for him, 13 were PAP assemblymen from the left-wing block.30 These 13 members were expelled from PAP and the branches of the party that they were responsible for. The moralisation of schismatic guilt soon began but what was left of PAP needed reassurance. A British record from a little over a year later, on 9 June 1962, has the Acting U.K. High Commissioner for Singapore noting that Lee Kuan Yew ‘wanted full British support from the Internal Security Corps for the arrest of Lim Chin Siong’ to which the Commissioner responded ‘we have broad backs and are not afraid to

128  Lee’s Favourite Communist carry out our share of the burden. I must however be convinced that the action taken will make things better and not worse.’31 In August 1961, the 13 ousted members formed BS and became the opposition party. In these circumstances, BS continued to play out its assigned nihilism by opposing the merger vote and suggesting that voters simply return a blank ballot as a protest. Although on 1 September 1962 around a quarter of the voting electorate followed this advice, in 1965 the pro-communist policy of ‘no merger without Singapore having equality in Malaysia’ finally triumphed, albeit with Lee Kuan Yew at the helm of PAP and no garlands being sent to BS. The instability of PAP in the merger years can only be understood against a background of social tumult. Lee’s reliance on the British military forces, their and his anticommunist bent, could be easily embodied in the Lim Chin Siong bogeyman. A taste of those chaotic times, and their multiple wills to power, underlines why an out in the open communist option was so deeply feared by Lee KuanYew, who knew that Lim would be a better politician than him if left unmolested. On 21 July 1964, the date of the Prophet Muhammad’s Birthday, rioting commenced in Singapore. A curfew was imposed throughout the remainder of July.32 On 2 August 1964, the curfew was lifted and life went on as usual. On 15 August, all Indonesian trading craft were banned from Singapore Harbour. Over the first few days of September, the rioting erupted again. A total of 13 people were killed and many were injured and widespread damage to private property occurred. Singapore was again put in a state of curfew between 4th and 15th September 1964 due to the rioting. The remaining occupying British force maintained that the rioting was ‘inspired by communists and Indonesians’33. This was also the American line. The CIA said that unlike the July riots, the ones in September were ‘not a completely communal affair’, seemed ‘better organised and using more sophisticated techniques’ and in line with Kuala Lumpur’s position that they were ‘being fomented by the Indonesians’.34 Tan Toh Hong, the leader of the centrist Malaysian Chinese Association Party, alleged that a member of the Ja’far Albar political party (United Malays National Organisation or UMNO) ‘touched off the riots in Singapore with an inflammatory speech but the fact remained that the conditions for such an outburst already existed and their existence was the fault of PAP’35. He concluded this because, in his view, in PAP’s years in power it had done nothing for Singapore Malays and Lee Kuan Yew had tricked them into voting for him in the previous September election by promising to improve their lot.36 Instead, many Malays were in the first wave to be evicted from their homes under a new Urban Renewal policy brought forward by PAP. This opinion was reiterated by Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister Toh Chin Chye. When he spoke to the Americans, he also pointed to UMNO's opportunistic seizing on the plight of the Malay

Lee’s Favourite Communist  129 evictees’ even though many more Chinese were to be resettled as a result of the relevant portion of the plan'.37 The British bases in Singapore were put on full alert in 1964. All leave, large-scale exercises, and training missions were cancelled. British forces were confined to barracks awaiting deployment. Competitions in rugby, dancing, boxing, athletics, football, and badminton occurred. Flying visits from the Top Brass were made. A local ordnance outfit, 443 BAD, won both singles and doubles cups in badminton and the inspection competition. There was a 'Treasure Island BBQ' for the officers that the all-male base's diarist decided did not need explanation.38 A State of Emergency began due to what would come to be known as the Indonesian Confrontation or ‘Confrontasi’ as it was also known. On Toh’s account, the July riots were regarded as ‘an inflammatory’ situation that followed an incident between a Chinese policeman and some Malays participating in a procession on the Prophet’s Birthday39. Starting on 21 July 1964, some 23 people died in the ensuing riots and 454 others were injured, many severely. The CIA backed the British military presence in Singapore by citing the U.S. Consulate being worried that ‘the police and the Malaysian troops may not be able to contain’ the disturbances.40 On one hand, it would seem that in the case of both the July and September riots of 1964, Malays were unusually sensitive to insult in Singapore or, as Tan Toh Hong framed it, waiting for a spark for ‘the dry tinder that was already there’.41 On the other hand, the CIA made note that ‘UMNO extremists’ distributed ‘anti-Chinese propaganda’ in Singapore ‘contributing to the sharp racial feeling which culminated in … the riots’.42 The British Foreign Office recognised in late 1965 that the changes occasioned by the separation required ‘a fresh plan’ to be ‘drawn up on a tripartite basis’ that would operate under the Joint Defence Council should there ‘be a request by Singapore’ for ‘the grant of British assistance’.43 This put the PAP leadership in a stronger place. After 1965, Lee Kuan Yew still had to manage the occasionally irritating sovereignty issues posed by the British military presence, but without the representation and jurisdiction restraints of the Federation, he had much more wiggle room for policies that benefitted Singapore, as well as back up for law and order issues when needed. Lee slowly became more secure with both the British and the Malays as the challenge from Lim disintegrated. Throughout the mid-1960s the lingering need for British forces allowed the British to play two sides against the middle in the name of lightly veiled British interests. In this regard, the will to power coursed through a time of transition and internal contest. In 1965, Lord Antony Head, the British Embassy’s top official in Kuala Lumpur, after expressing some very disparaging views on the Malayan race, and raising his concerns for the militant ministers vying with the Tunku, had this to say about the Malayans ruling in Kuala Lumpur:

130  Lee’s Favourite Communist They know that if politics become multi-racial and ideological in the long run they are bound to lose. They also know that the cleverest politician most likely to usurp their position is Lee Kuan Yew. Therefore say to the Chauvinists let us deal with Lee now and ensure our long-term position of dominance.44 Lord Head also could not help boasting: ‘I have done something to convince [Tunku] that to put Lee inside without a really good reason would embarrass the British Government’.45 When Lord Head said ‘embarrass’ he likely meant ‘politically undermine’ if one considers the continued power of the British in the region during the riots and the Confrontation with Indonesia. An enormous build-up of ordnance and equipment occurred in Singapore throughout the instabilities of 1964 and remained in place indefinitely thereafter. The firepower of the British government remained impressive to local eyes and confirmed that Lee’s power was not only shared but carved-off. The British Royal Artillery and Ordnance Corps based in Singapore dispatched 330 tons of ammunition to the Northern Malaya Coast. Its depot also received a further 334 tons of Royal Navy, Army, and RAF ammunition and 726 tons of explosives – reported to be the largest consignment in two years.46 From December 1963 to January 1964 no less than 13 ships carrying ammunition passed through the Port of Singapore. In January 1965, 83 vehicles on a single ship arrived in Singapore again setting a record for the previous 12 months. The British had given Malaysia, including Singapore, its independence in 1957 but there they were, in 1965, pouring huge resources into defending its old colonial outposts as an unchallenged ruler in the background. The PAP’s policy about regional politics in late 1964 was put candidly by the Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore Toh Chin Chye in a memorandum of conversation with Robert Moore the U.S. First Secretary of the Malaysian Embassy.47 It was remarkable how much the local communist spectre had retreated even though public blame for the riots barely mentioned them. Toh took the view that the July riots, in conjunction with the failure of the Kuala Lumpur government to take firm action against the Malay extremists, clearly indicated to Indonesia that Malaysia had ‘a soft belly’ in Singapore.48 The September riots had been ‘incited by Indonesia’ and carried out by Malay extremists who were determined to ‘exploit the differences between the Malays and the Chinese’.49 The riots had made Toh ‘extremely uneasy’ about potential sabotage of oil installations and ‘stressed the great demoralising effect if the Indonesians should have some success’ in blowing up such infrastructure.50 According to Toh, ‘people in Singapore now think that PAP leaders were suckers to join Malaysia’.51 Toh’s line was reported verbatim back to the President of the United States via the CIA.52 Toh cited the fact that since the merger, ‘Singapore has been beset by saboteurs and torn by two

Lee’s Favourite Communist  131 riots’53. He also pointed to the fact that Singapore had lost 23% of its trade (15% conventional and 8% of its barter trade) and at one point had 10,000 people unemployed.54 The CIA summarised this position in a special report on Malay-Chinese tensions: ‘If the PAP is forced to concede that membership in Malaysia has not brought promised economic benefits but the reverse, Lee Kuan Yew will be hard-pressed to justify continued participation in the federation’.55 Throughout 1965, PAP had regarded itself as an opposition party concerning the central government in Kuala Lumpur. It advocated noncommunal class-based politics and watery socialism, as opposed to communal politics and capitalism favoured by the Malay-dominated Alliance government. As the U.S. observers framed it, PAP asserted that ‘socialism not special rights are the solution to the general economic depression of the Malay’56. The extent of PAP’s socialism in Singapore was welfarism mixed with free-market capitalism. The idea of ‘socialism’ was used in these days as a fundamental-sounding point of difference with the Malay central government that did not require Lee Kuan Yew to be overtly racial in his politics. A little over one year after the first riots, on 9 August 1965, a tear-strewn Lee declared the separation of Singapore and Malaysia. Throughout the whole debacle of merger and separation, sympathy can be given to the Tunku. The central government in Kuala Lumpur ran the risk that, by using pressure tactics too effectively, it could topple the PAP moderate government by inspiring voters to swing not towards the Alliance (UMNO) candidates but to the pro-communist, anti-Malaysia, BS. This would be, the Americans noted: ‘an intolerable development in Kuala Lumpur’.57 On 8 December 1965 Lim Chin Siong vowed to Defence Minister Goh Keng Swee from Woodbridge Psychiatric Hospital that he was prepared to renounce communism. He would ‘make a clean break with his past’ and ‘take a public stand against the Malaysian Communist Party’ which still occasionally menaced Singapore from the jungles of Pahang.58 No matter what Lim promised, the damage had been done. Lee Kuan Yew’s strategy of jailing communist hardliners, so they had difficulty campaigning on the merger, had won out. On 22 December 1965, the Parliament of Singapore passed two bills formalising the constitutional and legal changes consequent from the separation and the independent Republic of Singapore began.59 In 1988, there appeared a piece in the Straits Times in which one ‘Mr. Khan’ recounted a conversation he’d had with Lee Kuan Yew about Lim Chin Siong over dinner: We took him as a hard-core communist who would never repent. A man's calibre you can see only by testing…I take it as a personal triumph for Mr Lee to have controlled him in politics and mass support. When you cut off the wings of a bird and it is not able to fly,

132  Lee’s Favourite Communist either it will commit suicide or it will go down and keep quiet. That's what happened to Lim Chin Siong. Otherwise, he was a very hardcore communist.60 The euphemisms of 'testing', repentance, and birds with no wings were designed to cultivate the assumptions of the reader as if there is no option but agreement. A great exception should, however, be taken to the phrase 'hard-core communist'. Nietzsche would agree that being fervent in any moral cause is not good. But facts should be faced. Elevating mediocrity to a moral benchmark in the manner of Lee Kuan Yew will never be seen as worse than out-in-the-open communist involvement in the public life of Singapore. But it should. And Nietzsche would be with me on that. How high above things, despising with no moral authority, does anyone suppose themselves when they call another ‘hard-core’? If there is agreement enough among readers over the central thesis of this chapter, it should be enough to call Lim Chin Siong a ‘communist’ plain and simple. Whether or not he was a communist was debatable. He had to be ascribed to the label as a condition of his guilt before the state of Singapore. Two years before his release from jail in 1969, a former comrade who had spent time incarcerated with him described his ‘five-star life’ inside.61 His cell had its own radiogram and a library of books. He had refused to lend his books. He spoke only to other English-educated inmates. He was regarded as ‘selfish’ and ‘arrogant’.62 By this time, Lim had renounced communism and accepted that Singapore was better off without it, but this was not enough. Perhaps he had to be a nicer person for his full guilt to be pardoned – a bit less bitter about it all. The decision to worry Lim Chin Siong out of his communism rather than kill him, as he had hoped for at several points, caused surprise to the editors of newspapers. The decision reflected the compromised colonialism by which PAP ruled Singapore. Its will to power relied on quasisocialist policies that were argued to be absolute moral necessities for the island republic although they were nothing of the sort. Instead, PAP dreaded and punished BS, as did the British government. When surveying the government options for Singapore, the British government thought that the idea of supporting the defeat of the PAP moderates and the installation of the pro-Communists ‘seems a dreadful course’.63 The alignment of the British overseers with their PAP underlings on the question of the communists turned out to be a defining cause of Singapore’s history. Lee’s psychological battle with Lim in jail before finally letting him go to exile could stand as an older brother’s firmness toward the misguided – the love of a household. Otherwise, it was tormenting and a darker reading must be given to Lee. In the next chapter, two years are selected to compare for a closer inspection: 1962 when the British saved PAP from the communists, and 1965 when the British saved the PAP senior leadership, Lee in particular, from being jailed by the Malaysians.

Lee’s Favourite Communist  133

Notes 1 Schacht, Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 29. 2 Schacht, Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, 29. 3 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 7. 4 CIA-RDP79R00890A001100100001-3: ‘Singapore’, 2. 5 CIA-RDP79R00890A001100100001-3: ‘Singapore’, 2. 6 CIA-RDP79R00890A001100100001-3: ‘Singapore’, 2. 7 CIA-RDP79R00890A001100100001-3: ‘Singapore’, 2. 8 CIA-RDP79R00890A001100100001-3: ‘Singapore’, 2. 9 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 7. 10 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 12. 11 Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 734. 12 CIA-RDP79T00975A006200500001-7: ‘CI Bulletin’, 12. 13 ‘Chin Siong Sensation’, The Straits Times, 1. 14 ‘Detainee is Freed After Renouncing Communism’, The Straits Times, 15. 15 ‘Detainee is Freed’, 15. 16 ‘Detainee is Freed’, 15. 17 ‘Detainee is Freed’, 15. 18 Teo, ‘Political Detainee Chia Thye Poh’, Business Times, 22. 19 Teo, ‘Political Detainee Chia Thye Poh’, 22. 20 WO305/2727: ‘Internal Security in Singapore’, [2]. 21 Cheong, ‘Witness Tells of Lifetime in Prison Threat, The Straits Times, 6. 22 Cheong, ‘Witness Tells’, 5. 23 Cheong, ‘Witness Tells’, 5. 24 Cheong, ‘Witness Tells’, 5. 25 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 4. 26 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 17. 27 CIA-RDP79R00890A001100100001-3: ‘Singapore’, 1. 28 CIA-RDP79R00890A001100100001-3: ‘Singapore’, 3. 29 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 24. 30 Lee, Singapore: Journey into Nationhood, 64. 31 WO305/2727: ‘Telegram Singapore High Commissioner to Sec. State for Colonies’, [5]. 32 WO305/2798/NAB 2063: ‘BAD Monthly Historical Record (Evans)’, [2]. 33 WO305/2798/NAB 2063: ‘BAD Monthly Historical Record (Evans)’, [2]. 34 CIA-RDP79T00936A003000260001-5: ‘President’s Intelligence Checklist’, [2f] & [2g]. 35 DEFE25/179: ‘Memorandum of Conversation KL-Sing’, [1]. 36 DEFE25/179: ‘Memo of Conversation KL-Sing’, [1]. 37 DEFE25/179: 'Memo of Conversation with Toh Chin Chye’, [1]. 38 WO305/2798/NAB 2063: ‘BAD ROC Monthly Historical Record (Mountford)’, [4]. 39 DEFE25/179: 'Memo of Conversation with Toh Chin Chye’, [1]. 40 CIA-RDP79T00936A002900050001-0: ‘President’s Intelligence Checklist’, [5E]. 41 DEFE25/179: ‘Memo of Conversation KL-Sing’, [1]. 42 CIA-RDP79-00927A004800090003-0: ‘Increasing Malay-Chinese Rivalry’, 2. 43 FO169/495: ‘Internal Security in Singapore After Secession’, 5. 44 WO305/2727: ‘Telegram Head to CRO’, [1]. 45 WO305/2727: ‘Telegram Head to CRO’, [2]. 46 WO305/2798/NAB 2063: ‘BAD Monthly Historical Record (Evans)’, [5]. 47 DEFE25/179: ‘Dept. State Memo with Toh Chin Chye’, [2].

134  Lee’s Favourite Communist 8 DEFE25/179: ‘Dept. State Memo with Toh Chin Chye’, [2]. 4 49 DEFE25/179: ‘Dept. State Memo with Toh Chin Chye’, [3]. 50 DEFE25/179: ‘Dept. State Memo with Toh Chin Chye’, [4]. 51 DEFE25/179: ‘Dept. State Memo with Toh Chin Chye’, [4]. 52 CIA-RDP79T00936A002900110001-3: ‘President’s Intelligence Checklist’, [2]. 53 DEFE25/179: ‘Dept. State Memo with Toh Chin Chye’, [4]. 54 DEFE25/179: ‘Dept. State Memo with Toh Chin Chye’, [4]. 55 CIA-RDP79-00927A004800090003-0: ‘Increasing Malay-Chinese Rivalry’, 5. 56 CIA-RDP79-00927A004800090003-0: ‘Increasing Malay-Chinese Rivalry’, 4. 57 CIA-RDP79-00927A004800090003-0: ‘Increasing Malay-Chinese Rivalry’, 6. 58 ‘Chin Siong Sensation’, The Straits Times, 1. 59 NAB1831/0044: ‘Singapore Fortnightly Summary No 23’(1965), [1]. 60 ‘Chin Siong, the Hard-core Communist’ The Straits Times, 11. 61 ‘The Five Star Life of a Leftist Chief – by an Ex-comrade’ The Straits Times, 13. 62 ‘The Five Star Life’, 13. 63 WO305/2727: ‘Telegram Head to CRO’, [3].

Bibliography Lee Geok Boi, Singapore: Journey into Nationhood (Singapore: Landmark Books, 1998). Nietzsche. The Will to Power (New York: Knopf, 1968). Russell, Bertrand. History of Western Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1961). Schacht, Richard (ed). Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994).

Archival Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Digital Reading Room CIA-RDP79R00890A001100100001-3: ‘Singapore (Based on NIE69-59)’ (20 October 1959). CIA-RDP79T00975A006200500001-7: ‘Central Intelligence Bulletin’ (17 March 1962). CIA-RDP79T00936A003000260001-5: ‘President’s Intelligence Checklist’ (7 September 1964). CIA-RDP79-00927A004800090003-0: ‘Increasing Malay-Chinese Rivalry in Malaysia: Special Report’ (9 April 1965).

Singapore National Archive WO305/2727: ‘Telegram from Singapore (Act U.K. High Commissioner) to Secretary of State for Colonies’ Telegram No. 285 (9 June 1962). WO305/2798/NAB 2063: ‘BAD ROC Monthly Historical Record, Captain JJ Evans’ (1963). WO305/2798/NAB 2063: ‘BAD ROC Monthly Historical Record, Lieutenant Colonel AH Mountford’ (1963). CIA-RDP79T00936A002900050001-0: ‘The President’s Intelligence Checklist’ (22 July 1964).

Lee’s Favourite Communist  135 DEFE25/179: ‘Memorandum of Conversation – Kuala Lumpur-Singapore Truce’ (26 October 1964). DEFE25/179: 'Memorandum of Conversation with Dr Toh Chin Chye Deputy Prime Minister of Singapore' (16 December 1964). DEFE25/179: ‘Department of State Memorandum with Dr Toh Chin Chye' (16 December 1964). WO305/2727: ‘Telegram from Kuala Lumpur (Lord Head) to Commonwealth Relations Office Telegram No. 1020’ (10 June 1965). NAB1831/0044: ‘Singapore Fortnightly Summary No 23’ (1965). FO169/495: ‘Internal Security in Singapore After Secession’ (8 January 1966). WO305/2727: ‘Internal Security in Singapore 1 October 1964-16 June 1965’ (16 June 1965).

Newspapers ‘Chin Siong Sensation,’ The Straits Times (8 December 1965). Cheong Yip, Seng, ‘Witness Tells of Lifetime in Prison Threat: Sedition Trial, Ninth Day,’ The Straits Times (16 July 1966) 6. ‘The Five Star Life of a Leftist Chief – by an Ex-comrade’, The Straits Times (11 December 1967). ‘Detainee is Freed after Renouncing Communism’, The Straits Times (20 May 1971). ‘Chin Siong. ‘The Hard-core Communist,’ The Straits Times (3 April 1988). Teo, Anna. ‘Political Detainee Chia Thye Poh Released Conditionally,’ Business Times (18 May 1989).

12 The Recurrence in British Interventions, Singapore (1962–1965)

The previous chapter followed the career of Lim Chin Siong with a Nietzschean inclination. It explained the politics he encountered in dealing with the will to power among PAP’s so-called ‘basement group’ of Lee Kuan Yew, Toh Chin Chye, and Goh Keng Swee. My emphasis in this chapter is on the British government’s interjections of control in Singapore and Malaya in the first half of the 1960s. During this time, the British government was akin to a retiring puppet-master – pulling a string here or pulling a string there. Two British interventions are noticed in this chapter: (1) The intensification of Special Branch anti-communist measures from 1962–1963 to prepare Singapore for the merger with Malaya; and (2) The protection of Lee Kuan Yew by the British government after it was apparent that Singapore could no longer remain merged in Malaysia. Communist Lim Chin Siong had advocated against the merger and had to be imprisoned for six years. The merger occurred and then abruptly ended a few years later because it was unworkable. The colonial support and protection of Lee Kwan Yew by the British government can be seen in these lights as unconditional. The Nietzschean literature has acknowledged how the idea of Superhumanity and the eternal return of the same establish ‘a system of contractions that supports Nietzsche’s philosophy but also causes it to fail’.1 I.e. a Superhuman breaks free of the past and the present in a burst of futuristic example but the eternal return of the same emphasises the old traumas and truth violations always slipping back into the conversation to cause debilitation in the present moment. The trauma was given extra force in the case of Lim Chin Siong because he had entered an enigmatic state of being correct about the future but incorrect about the present until he renounced communism.

The Recurrence in British Interventions  137 Where does the tension between Superhumanity and recurrence take us? Repressing communism repressed those against a unified nation to be constructed for the convenience and strategic interests of the British. When it became known in 1965 that a unified nation was impossible, it demonstrated that the winning view was the communist view of 19623. But laissez-faire government, under close British supervision, was entrenched with the moderates in Singapore and Malaysia. The convenience of the British, best served by a subservient Chinesedominated Singapore under the thumb of Muslim-dominated government in Kuala Lumpur had not come to pass. The ultimate problem was racial or ethnic-cultural. It was not about class politics as every player had thought. This revealed the character of colonialism, too. It was often failing but it never quite lost in Southeast Asia – not even in its dying days. In the desire to transform and overwhelm, Superhuman communists of Singapore had a prescient quality and, finally recalled from their brief triumph of free-thinking, found that the constraints imposed to secure their failure became the haunting spectres of a broader history insisting on mediocrity. The ISA allowed the Singapore government to know what people think through invasive surveillance, and to tell people how to think by crippling everyone with opposing viewpoints. Lim Chin Siong probably makes the best Superhumanity claim in 1960s Singapore. His idealistic provocations not only caused his suppression but the repression of every non-conformist, quite often non-communist, on the island republic ever since. One could consider Lord Antony Head or Lee Kuan Yew a Superhuman. Neither would have readily disagreed but neither stood for an ideal. The eternal return and its tentacles of surveillance had won, and the true Superhuman was laid low, injured, or imprisoned. Resolving the tension by reacting to an outrage, not being the cause of it, ultimately cost Singapore’s elite any chance of moving beyond humanity. We noted in the previous chapter Lord Head’s bombast about using the British government’s middle position to maintain its ‘dominance’ in the region.2 Whitehall clung on to its old Malayan military haunts well after 1965 by deploying a tone of economic partnership and service to its old colonies when and if it was asked to act for them. It took every opportunity to use sympathetic ministers in Malaysia and Singapore governments to recognise its strategic interests and to enact its will. The concern of this chapter is not nihilism i.e. the previous chapter demonstrated PAP’s elevation of social welfare pragmatism to a Singapore-centric morality to stave off meaninglessness. Nor is it necessary to add to the point that PAP’s compromised position meant that Lee Kuan Yew’s will to power was a matter of stifling rather than eliminating enemies. The tone of British discussions about diplomatic and military strategy in the semi-occupied Federation says much about colonialism more generally. i.e. the British claim to ‘dominance’ over both former

138  The Recurrence in British Interventions colonies in 1965 sounded indelicate because the role of the Foreign Office had declined. It gradually came to trust that Malaya and Singapore could stably govern themselves without upbraiding British interests. Every relaxation of British military and political power could be read as an increase in colonialism’s self-doubt or the desire to rule. Instead, the colonial will to power did not decrease with each decolonising step taken. Whitehall’s will to power moved from the foreground to middle ground to background when there was sufficient evidence that political decisions of self-governing ex-colonies were within an acceptable colonial spectrum. The specific British intervention of protecting Lee from arrest in 1965 indicated that colonial power had painted itself into a corner. The sons and daughters of Albion were forced to make the best of a fragmented future. Operation Coldstore in 1963, a Singapore-wide sweep of suspected communists, had not stopped the communists from being right that merger was the incorrect path. Therefore, the theme here is how the will to power handles mistakenness, and how the decisions taken in its wake, insist on correctness but compound the folly. This brings to contemplation an unintended history always trying to resolve itself. Not, in this case, for us to return to the fork in the road of 1963, but to move laterally to where life might have ended up had mistakenness, and its constant disavowal, not confirmed the world on its current path. The recurrence to watch for includes the rhetoric of vindication and the reiterative need to present oneself on the right side of history. The contaminating forgetfulness about who made the right call and the eternal loop of the ISA when political non-conformity appears also bear keeping in mind. Lord Head’s ungainly comment about British domination came after the independence of Malaysia in 1957, granting ‘self-government’ to Singapore in 1959, presiding over the merger in 1963, the separation in 1965, and Singapore’s independence on 9 August 1965. The British maintained its military presence in Singapore and all of Malaysia through the Anglo-Malayan Defence Agreement of 1957. The terms of self-government in 1959 were that the British retained control over Singapore’s defence and internal security. This state of affairs continued until 1971. Even then, there were still Australian and New Zealand military units in the region. The Royal Australian Airforce Base at Butterworth remained in Australian hands until hand over to local forces in 1988. The British and their proxies could not let go even after the communist threat had receded in the region. Malaya found self-rule earlier than Singapore because its local leadership group was avowedly anti-communist and not vulnerable to infiltration. This made the property of the British state and British citizens in Malaya safe. A colonial representation about the distribution of wealth in a territory could rely on people who supported capitalism and private ownership and who did not wish to take an interventionist approach to every economic anomaly that these elements created when enacted by a colonial system.

The Recurrence in British Interventions  139 In analysing the ‘dominance’ claim made by Lord Head in the previous chapter, one could begin with an assumption of hubris. That is usually a safe place to start when analysing the British Empire. Nietzsche made it clear about the will to power that even in circumstances when ‘individuals treat one another as equals’ it is in the nature of being alive that ‘it will want to grow, expand, draw to itself, gain ascendency’.3 And so, when the British did something for an ally, they did a lot for themselves. Their commonwealth of independent nations and those on the cusp of decolonisation were required to avoid embarrassing Her Majesty’s Government. i.e. as nations slowly aligned in purported equality of sovereign nationhood in decolonisation, they ought not to act with an independent foreign policy lest the still-prevailing hierarchies of military and economic power have to be reasserted. The British government was reportedly in touch with Lee Kuan Yew nearly every day between 1963 and 1965.4 This solicitude, grooming if you will, had its reasons. The British government wanted Lee to stop talking about a Malaysian Malaysia – taken to imply multiracial governance of the Federation – because it put the Tunku’s ‘blood pressure up’.5 Evidence strongly suggests that British PM Harold Wilson had personally intervened to prevent the government in Kuala Lumpur headed by Abdul Rahman from arresting Lee in 1965.6 The British government argued that Lee's pan-Asian rhetoric would be interpreted as disunity by Australia and New Zealand. This put their commitment of thousands of troops to the defence from the communist insurgence in Malaysia at risk.7 This line has formed the pluralistic account asserted to make the British government appear like a peacekeeper hanging on for sentimental reasons. In this cameo, we can only see those British who never operated with more than one goal in mind. They were keeping their old bailiwicks safe from communism for their rightful inheritors. That Lee Kuan Yew and the moderate PAP were not that popular in Singapore, or that the British angled Lee into supporting the merger despite it being a mistake, come through history as skipped heartbeats, not climactic arrests revealing true health. The government of Singapore these days is not deeply concerned about communism. Instead, it harbours affiliates who sell location-based social media monitoring systems to countries like Bangladesh8 and who openly dream of a platform ‘capable of neutralizing the encryption used by anarchists/ terrorists/ insurgents/ criminals of all sorts … in order to track them, identify them, locate them, chase them and finally bust them’9. This desire, to politically securitise a society with ubiquitous surveillance and extraordinary powers of detention, comes directly from the culture of the Special Branch in Singapore of the 1960s. It was based on two ideas. The first idea was that the ISA, including indefinite detention without trial, was necessary because the enemy never slept and was always a threat albeit an overstated one. A diplomatic cable of the U.S. Department of

140  The Recurrence in British Interventions State from 1974 declared of the Singapore communists: ‘although their organisation was badly mauled in 1963, this has not deterred them from rebuilding their shattered organisation and returning to the fray’.10 The second idea was that, if heralding a tumescent security threat no longer worked because there were no more communists in the jungle or the printing house, in the closet or under the bed, a threatening historical course that had been rigged into existence by malcontent wanted for validity. The PAP leadership, who for decades finished the sentences of colonials, could be confirmed simply by nominating a new enemy to harass without doing much more than paint it casting a huge shadow. Part of slipping into the background for Whitehall was the power of openly refraining from reminding its partners that decisive intervention remained on the table. Long-time newspaper journalist in the Far East, Tom Pocock, once wrote about colonial days before the Second World War. Then, all that was required to keep a grip on the colonial possessions was for the Governor of the Straits Settlements to take local Malay government representatives and aristocracy out on the government yacht to watch aircraft take off and touch down on a British aircraft carrier.11 Portents of British power had given way to a slightly stiff official language of one option being more detestable than another, being perturbed, or put in a spot. It had to convince parties emerging into power that there was consistency in British actions without alluding in any way that what was referred to was the compatibility of British action and self-interest. That they were looking for local proxies was in no doubt. Nor was an expectation of imperial political continuities after independence was granted or that technologies of power would be transferred to the trustworthy. A country granted its freedom or in the process of acquiring it should not impede the high hand of British power without good reason. Instead, it was exercised to the best advantage of an overall good, or as Nietzsche intoned for the self-absorbed nobleman, ‘what harms me is harmful in itself’.12 The British wished to forestall for as long as possible being reduced to symbolic power through a Governor’s General role or a diplomatic seat among many in the old colonial capital. The world seemed so straightforward. The aroma of Residency was recalled dreamily as the sour vanilla of latex or the earthy diggings for tin. The giving of advice to the be-medalled local sultanate, and it being taken, formed an agreeable world in which all the roles had been settled. Nevertheless, the British remained alive in their ministrations, and life naturally spawned dreams of expansion and hegemony even if it was in reaction to brutish communists. What was left to the British was an ability to intervene to nudge history back on to a desired, Red-harrying track; this they did with great success in 1962–1963 and 1965. The will to power, then, became an irresistible moment in which an opportunity to assist an ally and swipe at an enemy presented itself. Malaya was in effect recolonised by the British in the American-approved hunt

The Recurrence in British Interventions  141 for communist insurgents. The British will to power fanned out to take the ground in its pretext. The year 1962 was crucial as this was the year before the merger when PAP's pro-communist opposition, led by Lim Chin Siong, was effectively neutralised through British support. Due to the Indonesian Confrontation, the year 1965 was particularly stressful for the Federation, including Singapore, but it could have been worse. Lee Kuan Yew could easily have been put in jail for treason by the central government in Kuala Lumpur. It had held on to and expanded British colonial preventative detention laws that dated from the immediate post-war years. Alas, Lee was not a terrorist or a communist of any type. This made his potential treason a matter of overstepping a different mark clearly and his trumpeting a Malaysian Malaysia did not do this. Although Lee could be put inside a prison with ‘virtually no charge’ for 28 days under the Federation’s law, after that time there would have to be a charge.13 Lee took unusual care not to incite communal strife in the Federation in 1965 even though there was no law specifically against doing so. The creation of any such a law by Kuala Lumpur would appear counter-productive because Lee would be its obvious target and be alerted to his impending arrest. The British government and its local apparatus made interventions to prevent this from happening, and so, this helped Singapore’s separation into independent nationhood to occur. Although the British wanted the Federation to work, their will to power had become ingrained by the habit of divide and rule. The presentation by Lee of a competent if a mediocre option for Singapore seemed the easy course. In 1962, the U.K. Commissioner for Singapore entertained a campaign of anti-communist scares and dirty tricks on behalf of the PAP government using the Special Branch and all necessary organs of government. The objective was to put Barisan Sosialis (BS) in its place ahead of the vote on the merger anticipated in the following year. Indeed, the British-run Singapore Liaison Office recommended that the communistled United Front be disrupted by the use of ‘confusion tactics’ including false rumours and infiltration.14 These were thought to be suitable tactics because the communist groups in Singapore lay scattered after the proscription of the Malayan Communist Party in 1948. Apparently, 'there was some evidence of rivalry between them'.15 The United Front opposition was supposed by the British to be dominated by BS which, in turn, was controlled by the communists. BS continued to work to overthrow the PAP government through constitutional means. This included all possible spheres: political parties, trade unions, universities, and schools, among peasants and business people. They made particular use of house-to-house canvassing. The Hampshire Special Branch Report on Singapore's Internal Security noted that the organisers of the United Front were ‘Crypto-communists so skilfully efficient that the general public is quite unaware of this’.16

142  The Recurrence in British Interventions The Special Branch further contended that BS ‘have evidently no way of identifying the real communists among them’.17 The Special Branch was honest in its assessment that it could not be ‘confident of picking up the bulk of the underground communists, owing to a lack of satisfactory intelligence about them’.18 It was also readily admitted that the Special Branch had no evidence for the conclusion that communists effectively controlled the United Front or that it is they who have stimulated opposition to the merger.19 This ignorance was thought to be grounds for a campaign reinforcing Lee Kuan Yew’s message including ‘exposure of the true nature’ of the crypto-communists through government-inspired publicity.20 On 2 February 1963, the Internal Security Council initiated ‘Operation Coldstore’ culminating in the arrest of Lim Chin Siong and 112 other leaders and agitators across Singapore's union movement, cultural societies, and political parties. Lim was to remain behind bars until 1969 when he was released after sending the Prime Minister a letter renouncing communism and explaining his desire to study overseas. On 9 July 1963, the merger agreement came into effect and Malaya’s Internal Security Act (ISA) became Singapore law as well. In 1948, the colonial government brought the Emergency Regulations into effect, giving it the power to imprison communists without trial. In 1955, the Preservation of Public Security Ordinance reinforced this. Operation Coldstore merely demonstrated that Singapore had for a long time enjoyed the means to engage in preventative detention of political suspects, suppress terror campaigns, prevent subversion of the government, and the like. After mid-1963 it was articulated in national law and it remains so to this day. In 1963, the plan to expose communists was to be combined with a containment strategy aimed at the general tightening of press control and increased prosecutions of law-breakers during demonstrations and strikes. The strategy of public exposure, censorship, and street arrests would be followed by the second phase of all-out arrests after the vote on the merger. Federation Special Branch experts were drafted into Singapore to help the local Special Branch to 'work up' detailed cases against individual communists.21 At this point in the source document, there is a handwritten note in the margin asking: What does ‘work up’ mean? ‘Work out’ or ‘fabricate’?22 The reinforced Special Branch's enthusiasm for disrupting the communists of Singapore came from the trenchantly anti-communist Malaysian Tunku who wanted unequivocal action taken against them. In his view, there was a real risk of BS assuming power in Singapore before or after the Federation came into existence23. Once they did so, he reportedly opined: [and] with Communist leaders at large, Singapore is permanently lost to the West.24

The Recurrence in British Interventions  143 In this viewpoint, the Tunku and the Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew were more or less of the same mind after Lee had returned from an international tour in 1962: He was happy to have been able to win approval and support for Malaysia as the logical successor to the British in South East Asia and to have succeeded to some extent in killing the communist lie that Malaysia was a neo-colonialist move of the British.25 Therefore, the merger agreement was a plan to keep Singapore within the British sphere of control and this is why the British Commissioner Lord Head was so keen to assist both Malaysian and Singaporean leaders with their communist problem. The British forces were good to their word; so good as things transpired that the Malaysia Agreement of July 1963 was signed by all parties and included the Borneo states of Sarawak and Sabah. A referendum in Singapore confirmed the arrangement and, as the CIA put it, on 16 September of 1963, ‘the British flag was hauled down in both Singapore and the Borneo states and Malaysia came into being’26. A limit of 15 seats was placed on Singapore in the national legislature and it retained autonomy on health, education, and labour issues.27 Singapore committed to hundreds of millions of dollars of zero interest development loans for north Borneo and Sarawak, the establishment of a common market, and the garnish of 40% of its revenue by the central government.28 By adopting an abstentionist position, Lim Chin Siong and BS had lost the merger referendum vote and turned instead to agitating for a Greater Malaysia that had better relations with Indonesia and comprised of a coalition of Left-wing anti-colonial political forces.29 After a few short years, in 1965, Tunku Abdul Rahman ‘bluntly told’ Lee Kuan Yew that Singapore had to withdraw from Malaysia.30 This moment had been preceded by many incidents in 1964-1965 that had made many senior Malaysian politicians shake their heads at the intrigues and truculence of Lee Kuan Yew. In 1965, the British diplomatic corps in Kuala Lumpur under Lord Head had interceded in cabinet politics of the central government via the moderate Minister of Home Affairs, Mr Ismail Abdul Rahman. The Tunku and a group of cabinet ministers around him that the British dubbed ‘the Chauvinists’ had ‘agreed in principle’ that as soon as they could find a suitable charge ‘they would put Lee inside’.31 Ismail was ‘very strongly against putting Lee inside’ and would resign if it occurred unless on ‘unassailable grounds’.32 Part of the will to power is the ability and desire to work every angle to effect suitable politics; this impulse is often about finding the useful schismatic element or idea and simply announcing that it is not alone and it represents the true course. It is about flooding the field and encircling every possible reaction of the players so that only one political force can move.

144  The Recurrence in British Interventions The British Commissioner in Kuala Lumpur stressed to the Tunku ‘the particular difficulties that might follow the arrest’ of Lee.33 Although the Commissioner was 'disappointed about the provocative line Lee has taken recently', the present situation might perhaps lead to riots in Singapore that would prejudice British efforts to supply and maintain their forces in Borneo.34 The Commissioner recommended the Commonwealth Relations Office ‘weigh-in by underlining the problems [the Tunku] would confront …if Lee were put inside’.35 Not only was Lord Head pursuing his pro-Lee line by using the Commonwealth Relations Office to persuade the Tunku, but he was also using Ismail as an intermediary in the Malaysian cabinet and speaking to Lee directly on behalf of the Tunku.36 He undertook to tell Lee of the disappointment of the Tunku at ‘the provocative line he has taken’ and that Her Majesty’s Government also ‘deplored Lee’s proposal of separatism particularly during the Confrontation’.37 This was far too conniving to suit the British self-representation as a lamenting, pensioned-off gamekeeper hanging around in case the new marshals of the land were overwhelmed by poachers. The treatment of the pro-communists of BS by PAP in 1965 was a quid pro quo to the British and the Malaysians enabling Lee Kwan Yew to stay in power and for Singapore to fall out of the merged Federation. Lim Chin Siong left prison a broken man. He had been arrested in a sweep of BS leaders on May Day 1965. Throughout 1965 he was kept in solitary confinement away from the other three imprisoned BS leaders Mr Tan Jin Quee, Mr Tam Yam Seng, and Mr Ho Peow. Prison authorities made it known that there was a special relationship between Lim Chin Siong and the prison superintendent, Mr Quek.38 They also alleged that there were serious ideological schisms between the four detainees on the Russia/China divide in communism, among other issues.39 The political cleavages in prison were alleged by authorities to have been exacerbated by petty feuds leading to Lim Chin Siong being ousted from his role as leader of the detainees. The tactics of solitary confinement interspersed with incessant questioning had its desired effect on his sanity. Lim Chin Siong was found in 'a state of collapse' and was found in possession of a knife that had to be removed from his hand.40 He was placed on suicide watch in the prison hospital as he was constantly mumbling to himself and appeared to be in a state of acute depression. Lim attempted suicide by hanging with his pyjama top on a toilet cistern pipe but was resuscitated. By the end of November 1965, Lim Chin Siong told his doctors that he had ‘decided to quit politics’ and was ‘prepared to make a clean break with his past’.41 The years 1966, 1967 and 1968 came and went. He had no choice but to persevere until his release in 1969. Among the last of the Communist United Front (CUF) unrepentants, Lim Hock Siew and Said Zahari, were released from prison on to islands off the coast of Singapore in 1978 from where they needed permission to leave but could have visits from family members. This was because they

The Recurrence in British Interventions  145 ‘refused to give any undertaking that they would not support the use of force to change the system or that they would not participate in the activities of the Communist Party of Malaya’.42 Eventually allowed to practice medicine in Singapore as a General Practitioner, Lim Hock Siew continued to be a vocal critic of the Internal Security Act (ISA) until his final days. In 1979, Lim’s younger brother was released from detention under the ISA, after being held for eight years on suspicion of communist activities, partly because of pressure from U.S. human rights organisations.43 The Superhumans of communist Singapore had been stunted, dragged back into a securitised cave, and suppressed until they renounced their beliefs or became frail old men. Their audacity produced the dark entwining of Singapore's public life by the ISA in the 1960s, just as now. A leaked Stratfor email on Singapore’s decision not to repeal the ISA in 2011 confirmed the indifference of the intelligence affiliates of the U.S.: 'the ISA has become a major tool in Singapore's arsenal against security threats – not just to act against those taking action against the country, but also as a form of deterrence’.44 Raids under the ISA in 1974 also cultivated a view of the government as remaining vulnerable to ‘clandestine’ communist elements unless it held extraordinary powers of detention.45 The communists were said to rely on non-communists becoming complacent and lowering their guard when conditions were good. The communists 'believe they have greater tenacity of purpose'. 46 Superhuman audacity causes state suppression, which in turn, is codified in a way that can at a moment’s notice be unleashed on any unconformity of a government’s choosing. Therefore, the eternal return is generated by the brilliance, the outlandishness of the exceptions to dull, conservative Singapore. The Christian overtones of finally repenting or renouncing the satanic creed of communism put Lee Kuan Yew in the position of power through a dictatorship of Lim’s conscience. It is not the Heideggerian point of a prevailing Christian mode invoked by political power that is the most important aspect to note. Lee Kuan Yew made communism the odd one out by portraying his brew of tamed commerce and welfarism as necessary and measured. The Nietzschean strategy of not indulging a conclusion of meaninglessness, but setting a ceiling with reasonable mediocrity, won the day in the end.

Notes 1 Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence, 199. 2 WO305/2727: Head to CRO, [2]. 3 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 194. 4 ‘British Never Tried Using Me’ The Straits Times, 1. 5 ‘British Never Tried Using Me’, 1. 6 ‘Wilson Prevented Lee Kuan Yew’s Arrest’ The Straits Times, 33. 7 ‘British Never Tried Using Me’, 1. 8 Hackingteam email, ‘Location Based Social Media Monitoring’, [1].

146  The Recurrence in British Interventions 9 Hackingteam email, ‘You need more!’, [1]. 10 Wikileaks cable, ‘Communist Dissident Activities’, [6]. 11 Tom Pocock, East and West of Suez, 81. 12 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 195. 13 WO305/2727: Head to CRO, [2]. 14 DO169/175: ‘Internal Security Situation in Singapore’, [5]. 15 DO169/175: ‘Internal Security Situation in Singapore’, [5]. 16 DO169/175: ‘Internal Security Situation in Singapore’, [1]. 17 DO169/175: ‘Internal Security Situation in Singapore’, [3]. 18 DO169/175: ‘Internal Security Situation in Singapore’, [4]. 19 DO169/175: ‘Internal Security Situation in Singapore’, [4]. 20 DO169/175: ‘Internal Security Situation in Singapore’, [4]. 21 DO169/175: ‘U.K. Commissioner to Sec of State for Colonies’, [4]. 22 DO169/175: ‘U.K. Commissioner to Sec of State for Colonies’, [4]. 23 DO169/175: ‘U.K. Commissioner to Sec of State for Colonies’, [4]. 24 DO169/175: ‘Internal Security Situation in Singapore’, [7]. 25 DO169/175: ‘U.K. Commissioner to Sec of State for Colonies’, [4]. 26 CIA RDP01-00707R002200090010-5: ‘Singapore’, 2. 27 CIA-RDP79-00927A004800090003-0: ‘Increasing Malay-Chinese Rivalry’, [1]. 28 Lim Teng Seng, ‘Merger with Malaysia’. 29 ‘Barisan Malaysia Fear: British Alliance Axis’, The Straits Times, 20. 30 CIA RDP01-00707R002200090010-5: ‘Singapore’, 2. 31 WO305/2727: Head to CRO, [1]. 32 WO305/2727: Head to CRO, [1]. 33 WO305/2727: Head to CRO, [1]. 34 WO305/2727: Head to CRO, [2]. 35 WO305/2727: Head to CRO, [3]. 36 WO305/2727: Head to CRO, [9]. 37 WO305/2727: Head to CRO, [9]. 38 Cheong Yip Seng, ‘Lifetime in Prison Threat’, The Straits Times, 6. 39 ‘Chin Siong Sensation’ The Straits Times, 1. 40 ‘Chin Siong Sensation’, 1. 41 ‘Chin Siong Sensation’, 1. 42 Wikileaks cable, ‘Prominent Political Detainees’, 1. 43 Wikileaks cable, ‘Weekly Status Report’, 2. 44 Stratfor email, ‘Singapore not to Repeal Internal Security Law’, 1. 45 Wikileaks cable, ‘Communist Dissident Activities’, [6]. 46 Wikileaks cable, ‘Communist Dissident Activities’, [6].

Bibliography Löwith, Karl. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same trans. Harvey Lomax (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997). Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil trans R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1973). Tom, Pocock, East and West of Suez: The Retreat From Empire (London: Bodley Head, 1986).

Archival Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Digital Reading Room CIA-RDP79-00927A004800090003-0: ‘Increasing Malay-Chinese Rivalry in Malaysia: Special Report’ (9 April 1965).

The Recurrence in British Interventions  147 CIA RDP01-00707R002200090010-5: ‘Singapore – National Intelligence Survey’ (May 1973).

Singapore National Archive DO169/175: ‘Proposal for Dealing with Internal Security Situation in Singapore Prior to Merger with Malaya’ including ‘Mr. Hampshire: Internal Security Situation in Singapore' (30 May 1962). DO169/175: ‘Telegram from Singapore (Acting U.K. Commissioner to Secretary of State for Colonies’ (9 June 1962), [4]. WO305/2727: ‘Kuala Lumpur (Lord Head) to Commonwealth Relations Office’ Telegram No 1018 (10 June 1965).

Online Sources Declassified Diplomatic Cable, ‘Release of Prominent Political Detainees’ (Published internally: 5 February 1978) Avail: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/ cables/1978SINGAP05278_d.html (Accessed: October 18 2020). Declassified Diplomatic Cable, ‘U- Weekly Status Report: Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, Singapore Affairs’ (Published internally: 10 February 1979) Avail: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1979STATE035698_e.html (Accessed: October 19 2020). Stratfor email correspondence, ‘Singapore/Malaysia: Singapore not to Repeal Internal Security Law’ (Published internally: 17 September 2011) Avail: https:// wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/70/708417_singapore-malaysia-singapore-not-torepeal-internal-security.html (Accessed: October 19 2020). Declassified Diplomatic Cable, ‘Communist Dissident Activities in Singapore’ (Published internally: 22 June 1974) Avail: https://wikileaks.org/plusd/ cables/1974SINGAP02711_b.html (Accessed: October 18 2020), [6]. Hackingteam email correspondence, ‘RE: Inquiry for Location Based Social Media Monitoring System’ (Published internally: 1 April 2015a): https:// wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/17312 (Accessed: October 18 2020). Hackingteam email correspondence, ‘You need more! Was: Social Media Emboldens Islamists, Challenges Law Enforcement’(Published internally: 28 February 2015b) https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/51173 (Accessed: October 18 2020). Lim Teng, Seng, ‘Merger with Malaysia’ (Published: 3 November 2017) Avail: https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_2017-11-06_110458.html (Accessed: October 18 2020).

Newspapers ‘Barisan Malaysia Fear: British Alliance Axis,’ The Straits Times (16 October 1962). ‘Chin Siong Sensation,’ The Straits Times (8 December 1965). Cheong Yip, Seng, ‘Witness Tells of Lifetime in Prison Threat: Sedition Trial, Ninth Day,’ The Straits Times (16 July 1966).

148  The Recurrence in British Interventions ‘British Never Tried Using Me to Weaken Tunku’s Government, says PM’ The Straits Times (13 June 1988). ‘Wilson Prevented Lee Kuan Yew’s Arrest,’ The Straits Times (26 May 1995), 33.

13 Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong (2019–2020)

In this final chapter, Heidegger and Nietzsche go relatively quiet. This is not because they have little use as explanatory props for the protest conditions of modern Hong Kong. Instead, this chapter focuses on redressing historical amnesia making for an imbalance in how Hong Kong views itself. This chapter is a Heideggerian inquiry in its style i.e. ‘what is the way by which we come into the asking of the question’ of why Hong Kong's struggle is said to be about its freedom and democracy?1 Only by asking a different question about Hong Kong can the stalemate in its protest politics become unconcealed so that a better future might be glimpsed. What was the cause of the yearning for a better life at the heart of the 2019 protests? It has been downplayed for decades. The loss of political independence has not soured the Hong Kong dream. The real loss? The cross-generational dream of buying and mortgaging real property to fund a business venture, marriage, family, and a residence (separate from your parents). I began to think along these lines when I saw the otherwise unexplainable angst and nihilism of young people in the scenes of desecration in the Legislative Council (LegCo) and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) witnessed in 2019. The violence expressed anger over the loss of a propertied life once possible. Now a life mostly inaccessible, its violent mourning came from Hong Kong becoming too expensive to its people. Unchecked property speculation, monopolism, and rental profiteering are the concealed causes of Hong Kong’s troubles. Most views ventilated in the Western media disclose a broad tendency to frame the debate over contemporary Hong Kong in sympathy with the protesters by emphasising their infringed agency or disappointed expectations. The slender victory won by all of the violence and property damage of 2019, and its repercussions in the subsequent imposition of the National Security Law, will sound in internal recriminations inside the protest movement before long if it has not already started. By developing a

150  Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong historically-founded political position, Hong Kong’s protesting youth can recognise their history and the misalignment of their hopes in current times. In particular, headway can be made by exploring: (1) How KMT political philosophy post-1949 has continued to acculturate Hong Kong's students to a certain kind of legal and political order that has very little to do with democracy but serves only to maintain a discriminatory buffer between the territory and China that becomes hysterically animated in moments of presumed external interference from Beijing; and (2) How the limits of freedom experienced by students are fixed legacies of the political philosophy chosen by the KMT in response to the New Culture movement which, to pursue bourgeois nationalism, privileged easy money proclivities exemplified by landlordism and compradorial business cooperation with foreign firms. If one asked someone from Hong Kong about the historical tradition of the riots in 2019, one would probably draw a blank expression. Although this could be due to an ignorance of history, it would not be a case of the causes being ‘new’. A select group of related concerns always makes trouble among Rightists in Hong Kong. They are like a genetic twitch. Hong Kong people take particular exception to those things that make the mainland seem closer. Examples include riots based on a sense that too many refugees were clogging up the place (1956), a sedition law that would allow a Hong Kong organisation to be banned if it had links with a counterpart on the mainland (2003), and a proposal for communiststyle civic education in schools (2014). In 2019, a law on extradition that targeted criminals harboured by Hong Kong became quickly inflated as an attempt to shut down local political activism by licensing Communist deportation of locals to the gulags of presumed-guilty China.2 Anyone who raised their voice in protest about anything was claimed to be vulnerable under the new law, although it was said to be aimed only at mainland criminal offenders who improperly sought refuge in Hong Kong’s notionally separate jurisdiction. The vox pop from Hong Kong sounded factual enough. Jackson has suggested that “young Hong Kong people are being expected to conform to a society with a legal tradition of a very different ‘flavour’ than they have been brought up in, which they did not willingly consent to join and assimilate to”3. A similar theme was pursued more pointedly by Xu Zhangrun who stated that the political problems of Hong Kong are an outcome of ‘the blatant refusal to abide by the undertaking stipulated in the Hong Kong Basic Law regarded general elections [for the Chief Executive of the territory].’4 This line continues: ‘the repeated missteps’ of the government have been followed by ‘clumsy and haphazard moves’ leading to the ‘complete collapse of public confidence’ in the leadership of the territory.5

Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong  151 A Nietzschean reading of the events in Hong Kong, 2019 would be a quick matter. No resort to the will to power is needed. Beginning with a single denunciation, and then adding several demands from Cloudcuckoo-land, the territory’s youth unwisely pursued a ‘taste for the unconditional’.6 In their ambit claims, they ‘falsified’ conditions so that they could ‘vent themselves on them’.7 It remains to be seen, whether the youth of Hong Kong, 'tormented by disappointments finally turns suspicion on itself’8, as Nietzsche put it. Perhaps some self-examination will occur. There will never come a time, however, when a twenty-year-old firebrand handing a torch to ‘the next generation’ will not sound absurd. When asked to assess the protesters, Heidegger’s most relevant insight was that truth is the product of unconcealment and that public realisation of the truth occurs through its ‘enduring’ in presence and ‘stabilisation’9. This does not necessarily imply a political breakthrough resulting from realization of truth. That the Hong Kong police and their reinforcements were not conflicted about their duty during the protests came as a genuine surprise to many protesters who had, in previous years, come to see the local police almost as friends, and certainly not baton-wielding thugs. Protesters had to be bloodied, gassed and locked up repeatedly (unconcealment) to realise that the police of Hong Kong were not sympathetic (truth). The truth was that Hong Kong’s trial judges of Occupy 2014 were excessive in their penalties and that the police of Hong Kong did not serve their community in a measured way in 2019. These truths were not the product of epoch-shifting unconcealments because the unconcealing actions arose from pursuing confused and historically discordant cares. We noted at the end of Chapter 3 that the CIA loved to describe the fortunes of Southern China and analyse them with great intellect (unconcealment) if not much wit. But no contingent action flowed from the truths of the CIA’s findings on southern China and Hong Kong, ever. As unconcealment causes truth, it does not always follow that receipt of the truth, or its standing-by without contradiction, causes historical change. A protest community must act for the right kind of truth for it to do damage to weak contexts and gather invincible ones. Recall that for Heidegger, it is when unconcealment yields a predominant truth that something can be ‘sayable, visible, showable, perceivable’.10 Unless a social movement has the essence of self-truth under the steam of collective action, little can change. That’s the current reality for the Hong Kong protest movement. If the protesters were to interrogate their relationship to landlordism in a reductionist Nietzschean quest for truer foundations, that could work. So would a Heideggerian inquiry into why their current political cares for freedom and democracy are unconvincing. A confrontation with landlordism, and the solipsistic assumptions it has given the protest community, could also yield promising results. It would reconfigure what Hong Kong means by democracy to increase its mandate to all those outside the orbit of property returns. It would give cause for

152  Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong emancipatory action that the CCP could not counter without exposing its cares to absurdity. The Hong Kong protests of 2014 and 2019 have not received much interpretation. The grandparents of today’s protesting generation passed their disillusion with communism down the family line. This has caused what were perceived to be non-communist cares to proliferate. Expounding a third way for Chinese politics, Chang Fei-hsiung noted that some southern Chinese educated in the Old Society days, who were aged between 35 and 60 when the civil war ended, initially held belief in the CCP’s plans for the New China. By remaining in the hamlets of the mainland in 1951, they witnessed their former manner of living destroyed slowly but surely until they had become reduced by hardship to a life of scarcity and mental angst.11 Stay in China and lose your Old Society status, property, and freedom or leave China and start a new and uncertain life. This was the stark choice of many Mainland Chinese in the years of the Chinese nation's Great Divide, before deciding on Hong Kong. The hyperventilation of contemporary Hong Kong protesters suggests a similar degree of disillusionment. They do not face upheaval in personal or collective fortune, anywhere near the magnitude of the propertied middle-class of southern China in the early 1950s. This must lend proportionality to their protests but so far has not. The KMT has no lineage in democracy and neither have the protesters of 2019. The Western powers refused at Versailles to return Qingdao to China after World War One. It had been a German possession. In 1919, the Western powers gave it to Japan despite hundreds of thousands of Chinese nationals from Shandong being used by the British as trench runners on the Western front.12 The betrayal was so great that overnight it created an ocean of doubt about how Western political values could be transferred into China in a way that could be adapted and controlled by the Chinese themselves. The year 1919 allowed the party that would become the bourgeois KMT to point to a time when China, weak and divided, was at the mercy of the West in a way that constitutional democracy could only make worse for the process of unifying the country. Apart from the comparative ease of many Hong Kong lives, the contention that the 2019 protests were about democracy or freedom cannot go unchallenged. The New Culture movement emerging in China in the 1910s, struggled with Western ideas of governance that privileged landlordism and merchant profit, rather than representative government and science. Unsurprisingly, the New Culture movement became co-opted and interpreted by Leftists. As Chiang and the KMT leadership steadily lost its connection with urban landlordism in the 1930s, an assumption grew up in its place that the propertied classes would not be burdened by legislated reform or taxation if they helped the KMT consolidate its political authority in the countryside. The Land Law passed in 1930, for

Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong  153 instance, promised a reduction in rents and to strip absentee landlords of their estates.13 It was only ever partially enforced. The quid pro quo was for landlords to act as guides when the KMT re-entered lands liberated from communist control. In return, the landlords could enlist the services of KMT troops, and their gangster affiliates, to extract taxes and rents from peasants. This relationship of reciprocity became the received idea of governance taken to Hong Kong for the forty or so years after 1949 among the demi-generalissimo types and old landed families that flooded into the territory from the mainland. Private property rights and guaranteed rights to commercial adventurism backed by property stood in for broader conceptions of political freedom. Ideals of governance became defined and accepted as tolerable freedom from governmental interference in Chinese commerce, including rent-seeking. Issuing guarantees of mutual support in confirming hierarchical rights associated with commercial and property pursuits came to dominate the colony. Offering representative possibilities for the predominantly working-class population was never on the table for the British or the KMT off-scouring class in any way. Such as they were, the political rules and observances of the protoKMT defined themselves in reaction to vital national issues in the years between 1918 to 1922. These included those raised by the May 4th Movement of 1919. Building on the New Culture concerns, this was an influential call for a New China that came from the intellectuals of the mainland bourgeoisie. Many of Sun Yat-sen's philosophical concerns developed over this period. The Movement of 1919 emphasised ditching classical Chinese in favour of the communicative purpose best expressed in vernacular Chinese in poems, novels, serials, and the like.14 The May 4th Movement gave inspiration to a broad cross-section of Chinese intellectuals as it favoured reason over tradition and individual freedom over the collective invocation of authority under Confucianism. It was based on historical criticism and research, and thus could be called rational or humanist in outlook.15 Noted literary critic, and a leading light of the May 4th Movement, Yu Pingbo, said in 1925 that China had to ‘attend to feudal culture and landlord politics’ in particular to ‘wash our domestic shame first … before we can truly defend ourselves against outside aggression’.16 There has been a consistent intellectual impulse in China since 1919 not only in favour of science, democracy, and Chinese literature freed of classical constraints fed by its Confucian roots. At the centre of the debate between intellectuals has been the priority that internal property-related asymmetries need to be given as a prelude to emancipatory struggle and defense against external influence. Once it is decided whose Hong Kong is being struggled for, the struggle can claim a united base seeking reforms on a sound basis. It is folly trying to resist Mainland Chinese interference in Hong Kong’s politics without deciding whose future is at stake and being explicit about it. Why does Hong Kong, a reputedly wealthy place, keep several of its elderly in cage

154  Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong apartments? Why don’t many of its youth have their own bedroom at night? When the day comes that such questions make people angry, it is conceivable that new cares, unconcealments, and truths will emerge so that ‘democracy’ can be spoken of. Much of the sensitivity and distrust in Hong Kong toward the mainland Communist government is due to the protesters being the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of KMT affiliates who flooded into Hong Kong in the early 1950s. These people were those KMT officials who had been disloyal to Chiang Kai-shek or had been among the most corrupt.17 Among them were also hapless victims in the Great Divide of 1949. They regarded their new home as a refuge from the old politics but carried with them minimalist governance expectations as an invisible cargo. British colonialism offered them solace about the past without them having to make many cultural or linguistic adjustments. They were granted freedom to move in the world at large. The only catches were that they worked industriously and stayed out of politics seeking to pluralise the franchise. After 1949, the colonial strategy was to freeze remnant KMT elements out of political power but accept their investment of money and labour energy. As Chan has pointed out, perhaps at the cost of his academic aspirations to lead Hong Kong University, what emerged was Hong Kong’s ‘strange’ political system in which ‘those who are in power have no popular mandate, and those who have a popular mandate have no power’.18 This has made the model easy for the Communist central government to mitigate popular representations of political power by a kind of late colonial continuance characterised by intruding its people into key positions. Allowing overrepresentation in life opportunities to neurotic business interests restricted to a tightly fixed range of political concerns has also been important. Let us begin a little history of the 2019 riots in an obvious place. What happened to KMT adherents and sympathisers after 1949 when the civil war was lost and they decided to descend on Hong Kong? Most importantly to this story, about 13 million people remained in communities outside of China and about two million left it for Hong Kong, and about the same to Taiwan. These diaspora communities of East and Southeast Asia acted as a source of remittance income for their family members trapped in the cash-strapped new Communist republic. Two million KMT affiliates optimistically and unwisely stayed in Southern China. They were labelled ‘Rightist’ or ‘counter-revolutionary elements’ subject to extra-judicial execution in the villages by being shot in the back of the head or thrown alive into quicklime pits. Others in the propertied class took the CCP propaganda at face value and switched horses mid-stream. They were aghast at how the actual reform agenda of the Communists dismantled their wealth, brick by brick. If lucky, KMT affiliates were banished to labour camps in Szechuan for re-education where, no matter what their rank had been in the Old Society,

Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong  155 they were rehabilitated back up to the social standing of a rural labourer by digging irrigation ditches for five years. To avoid this fate, many committed suicide. Some fled through Burma and the Shan states into northern Thailand and, from there, to northern Malaya where they provided brains or paramilitary networks for the biggest opium smuggling syndicate in the world. The two ‘great distribution points’ to overseas markets for finished black opium, in 1948, were Hong Kong and Singapore.19 Some in diaspora KMT communities were dominated by veteran ‘sleepers’ who ran the chambers of commerce but otherwise kept a low profile throughout colonial Southeast Asia. Others were akin to Nietzsche’s ‘warrior of bad conscience’ who was accustomed to being in the government and after the exodus ‘suddenly all of their instincts were deprived of value and suspended’.20 The rhetoric of a national government fighting for a unified Free China did not fall away from Nationalist China in exile. It continued in a hollow recitation the likes of which Nietzsche understood well: ‘there has never been such a feeling of misery, such leaden discomfort on earth’21. The enterprise of exodus and resettlement was a shambolic affair given a certain levity by family reunions, shared thrift alleviated by the criminal pangs masquerading as social welfare organisations and people focusing on nothing but tomorrow. One can draw a straight line between the philosophy of the KMT refugees who came to Hong Kong and the street battlers in black t-shirts and surgical masks that filled our screens for the second half of 2019. Very little about them can be acknowledged in the international media or allowed to contribute to their self-knowledge. Not their historical role as descendants of inconsolably reactionary Nationalists. Certainly not the way their future has been squeezed to exhaustion by the cost of living. It was imposed by their dissolute forebears and much-admired ‘betters’. By exempting the dubious ethics of landlordism from the progressive New Culture principles that otherwise informed it, the KMT rose to political success in the 1920s as the bellhops of the propertied class. Landlordism as the cornerstone permission enabling the KMT worldview continues to be ignored as the legacy issue on the streets of Hong Kong in 2019. On Nietzsche's dark constitutional prescription, re-tuning moral principles gives rise to 'successful crimes', which are not only responsible ‘for all innovations in moral thinking’22 but are forgotten immoralities guiding so-called legitimate policies. Chinese liberals at the heart of the New Culture movement in the early 1920s fought oppression by 'the three great mountains of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism'.23 There was no great impediment in the KMT following Western-style policy on science and technology or extricating China from dark internal influences of Confucianism which insisted on the classical over the vernacular, and grandee tradition over new kid merit. It was nothing if not the party of new money, after all.

156  Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong The KMT was ambivalent about the external influence on treaty ports and concessions and the adventurism of foreign capitalists in China. These positions made it problematic inside and outside of the country. Remember those black-shirted students throwing petrol bombs on the streets of Hong Kong in 2019? One hundred years ago, their party in 1919 was funded by rent-seekers and industrialists who threw their lot in with foreigners and went in as a junior partner in their joint ventures. This party believed in a non-interventionist government run for the interests of landlords. These are the underlying assumptions of Hong Kong's democracy and independence movement. The Western media want to call their violence evidence of a sincere anti-CCP democracy movement. Yet they will not risk their old hopes of being a landlord, no matter how fantastical it becomes. They will not approve of a fresh distributive principle for Hong Kong if it impinges on this die-hard hope. Heidegger speaks to this state of affairs. His idea of care as the being of Dasein has a particular force. ‘Care’ for things in the world is what unconceals or ‘discloses’ them to you.24 There exist limits to what you care about. As a result, the extent of what you know to be true is limited to your cares. Like any distinctive group, what Hong Kongers know about history is comprised of what they care about. The intellectual schism in China after 1919 meant that the New Culture movement would become an inspirational proto-movement for the communist nationalists under Mao rather than the KMT under Chiang. The communists entrenched themselves as the revolutionary option and the bourgeoisie sought to accommodate foreign capitalists into the renewal of China with insipid faith in democracy and science. The leadership of the KMT was left free to philosophise vaguely about the regeneration of the national spirit, go on collaborating on a pre-determined basis with Western capitalists and preserve the rising power of urban landlords as the class to watch in Chinese society. All of these values passed as an invisible cargo of the refugee columns surging into Hong Kong from 1949 to 1962. The post-1949 transformation of Hong Kong by the remnant KMT populations of Southern China and Shanghai was a little short of remarkable. From 1945 to 1955 over 1,057,000 Mainland Chinese took refuge in Hong Kong.25 Many in the first waves fled anti-KMT purging, land reform, or conscription into a division of the 4th communist army used to fortify Kwangtung from anticipated air attacks and sea landings. The refugees in Hong Kong had not been purged but spooked. They had been handed a black identity card by the communist authorities that meant that they had been a close associate of the previous KMT regime. From 1956 to 1964, the inflow to Hong Kong slowed down but there was an annual average of 45,000 refugees per year.26 In 1966, those characterised as Overseas Chinese in Hong Kong stood at 3,739,000 people out of the colony’s total population of 3,804,000.27 The Overseas Chinese population of Hong Kong was the largest in Asia and bigger than the Chinese

Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong  157 populations in Indonesia or Thailand. It stood at 20 per cent of the total Overseas Chinese population of Asia.28 It was not merely its proximity that made Hong Kong the easiest place to go. More on that to come soon. Since the end of the Second World War, Hong Kong has been the destination of choice of KMT affiliated businessmen running the monopolies with the British. Others came too. Construction men risking bamboo scaffolding to nurse a bottle of beer on the tram home to Happy Valley. Absconding soldiers crowding the street corners in tattered uniforms stripped of insignia. There were spies everywhere. The hard men and cool hands of a multitude of secret societies ran numbers, opium, Benzedrine, protection scams, and all manner of kinky diversions in the fleshy trades. You name it. They could supply it. If Hong Kong was not already a KMT-dominated haunt in 1946, it had become one by 1952. Much of life was about predation on someone slightly more desperate, naïve or recently-arrived than you. The refugees racing into Hong Kong after 1949 were in the main southern anti-Communists. They had been prone to move around when they had the run of the mainland. These impulses had long conditioned their politics. They sought a particular type of modernity. Portable. Hustling. They were pedlars enamoured with the latest thing. Although Hong Kong was a colonial outpost, deciding to go there when the communists looked like winning was no accident. Once landed there, Hong Kong guaranteed their freedom of movement. It was a financial hub into which the Chinese communities of South East Asia congregated (Nanyang as it was collectively called). They poured their investment into the real property, merchant, and shipping markets for a quick return. After 1949, the coastal communities of Kwangtung could no longer labour at home for a few years and then take a shipping job or a small business sojourn to Singapore or the Straits settlements to work for two or three years before coming back with good money and prospects of starting a family. As well as being a place to escape communism, Hong Kong offered the great advantage of what was called ‘the roving life’29. It became the undisputed capital of Nanyang. Fitzgerald noted in 1966 that it had achieved ‘a position of dominating importance’ in the life of the Overseas Chinese communities and added that its ‘wealth, sophistication, modernity and high educational level set the tone for Nanyang.’30 The KMT refugees, defeated by communism and locked out of the big end of town in Hong Kong, could struggle away in substandard housing doing a variety of jobs for a few years and then leave for Nanyang to find their fortune. Such was the symbiotic importance of Hong Kong. Most KMT refugees did not bring the New Culture philosophy to Hong Kong and those who did found no ready outlet for its principles. Its program was too daring. Bianco called the May 4th Movement ‘a groundclearing enterprise’31 which ‘called into question the very basis of Chinese society’.32 The precedents and hierarchical recognitions of Confucianism

158  Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong were to be swept away in favour of science and democracy. The openness to Western influence of the new arrivals made them easy to govern but the British had little purpose for any democratic impulses. They had enjoyed so much impact in the day-to-day running of Nationalist China that their refugees did not miss them either. Confucian and traditional China had once ranked scholars and landed peasants above the industrialists, merchants, and rent-seeking classes. After 1927, new money classes came alive to the possibilities of Western thinking for the political order of China. Throughout government crises on Mainland China, foreign occupation, and civil war, the economic position of the landlords rose and rose yet more, along with their political affiliates, on a free-market philosophy as the public authority of the government went into scandal-riven freefall. There was at least one exception to the rise of the landlords. The early 1930s in the communist-controlled soviets of Kiangsi (Jiangxi these days) and Hunan gave an early warning to the landlord class. Early communist experiments in land reform, a topic dear to the hearts of peasants, caused one of the ‘bloodiest anti-landlord purges ever seen in China’.33 Mao was successful in the communists' winning peasant support through land confiscation and redistribution throughout the border areas and the Gan river valley. The policy was seen as ‘a source of their strength and a trump card against the Kuomintang which was all too closely identified with the landholders’.34 Every non-communist aspirant to national rule in China, or a part of it, including the KMT, the Japanese occupiers, and the various collaborator governments, looked to the landlords for political stability by controlling the peasantry and the urban workers and ordering the social structure.35 In 1933, Chen described China’s landlords in the 20th century as ‘quadrilateral beings’; that is they were simultaneously rent-takers, merchants, usurers, and administrative officers.36 As landlords and merchants, they often needed to adopt an ambiguous, self-serving position on Chinese nationalism because of the foreign control of comprador capitalism in the international coastal concessions. Throughout the later 1940s and the early 1950s, the CCP applied a status scheme to these ‘quadrilateral beings’. If they had an income due to a trade or profession that was greater than that received in rent on an allotment of land in a county, they would be categorised ('trade or profession – landlord').37 These people were considered small lessors and not landlords. If the reverse applied and they earned more from their land than their profession (‘landlord- trade or profession) then they were regarded as landlords.38 Those designated 'Trade or profession – landlords' could hold land necessary for their trade or profession that was not agricultural; those who were predominantly landlords were liable to land reform initiatives. A person who tilled part of their land by themselves and with hired help but rented out the larger proportion of their land to others was regarded not as a rich peasant but as a landlord and the extra portion not directly tilled by them went into the land redistribution pot.39

Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong  159 These might seem to be hair-splitting specifications but they did allow city and country landlords to retreat to their home base to own what was immediately theirs and used by them on a day-to-day basis. Everything else went to the labouring rural poor. By September 1951, the land reform movement, although having problems, had redistributed 81% of the whole East China rural land area and this affected the fortunes of over 105 million souls.40 Throughout 1950, there were landlords in Kiangsi, Honan, Hupei (Hubei), and Hunan who actively opposed land reform scheduled to take effect in spring the following year and were subject to the coercions of the Central and South China Military Administration Committee.41 One report simply noted ‘the stubborn opposition of the landlords was overcome by the prompt action of the people’s courts’.42 There was in addition to land reform, and tens of millions of catties of grain and implements being handed to peasants, a rent reduction, and rent deposit refund campaign.43 After 1949, those members of the Gan-speaking Hakka landlord class from Kiangsi and Hunan who did not flee for Taiwan or Hong Kong, commit suicide, or fall in the so-called quota killings of 1950–1951, found themselves redeployed to a subsistence life in the mining industries of places like Kiangsi. First, they were stripped of their houses, furniture, and lands. These were allocated to hundreds of peasants brought from outside the region.44 Next, the landlords were deported to mines to provide labour. One CIA record attested that over 500 'local rich farmers, unstable elements and landlords' were sent to the tungsten mines of Kiangsi. There was a class of paid, skilled labourers who were trained and the landlord group, each of whom were given 9/160 catties of rice, 2/160 catties of cooking oil, and 3/160 catties of tobacco for each day worked.45 The tungsten was sent to Russia. As for the ‘quadrilateral’ merchants, the deeper the entrepreneurial engagement with foreign business became, the more apparent it was to their class that their small and limited business holdings relied on Western businesses for machinery and the fuel and power required to drive it. As Wolf put it, ‘they did not care for the ways of the foreign devils but they were victims of the pact they had signed with them’. 46 As 'adjutants of foreign power on Chinese soil', as Wolf saw it, made the mainland merchant class a larger contradiction in value creation than the landlords but, because of it, was drawn very strongly to the KMT. It successfully fought bureaucratic intrusion by using Western conceptions of reason to improve their status to a gentry-like realm by buying and selling items for a modest profit. In this elevation, they had to reconcile their taste for freedom with the constriction imposed by oversized Western business models that crowded them out of better opportunities by conglomerating service industries such as a railroad interest, a printing press, a shipyard, insurance companies, and a stranglehold on banking.

160  Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong For the merchants, their compromises with Western firms paled to insignificance in late 1949 as the refuges of ‘the foreign devils’ in Hong Kong and Singapore began to look appealing in a manner never seen before. In one story, Ho Chi-p’ing – chairman of the Canton chamber of commerce under the Nationalists – fled Canton when the communists secured it.47 A little while after, he secretly returned to the city and tried to re-establish his business. The communist authorities told him that for his and other merchant businesses to continue in Canton he would have to levy the equivalent of HK$ 15,000,000 in local currency from his fellow merchants and give it to the local government by 15 December 1949.48 He attempted to collect the money but was ‘censured’ by his fellow merchants who refused to pay him anything.49 He left Canton ‘secretly’ in 1949 and ‘took refuge in Hong Kong’.50 Once on British soil, Ho Chi-p’ing ‘complained very bitterly’ against the communist regime and further stated that ‘even if they remained in power throughout China’ he ‘would have nothing more to do with them’.51 He further noted that ‘most merchants in Canton shared his feelings and were preparing to move their businesses and families to Hong Kong to avoid communist oppression’.52 Making a clean break for Hong Kong was also appealing to merchants because communist guerrilla groups were operating in the area between Kwangtung and the British-controlled New Territories. They levied a ‘customs duty’ on goods being traded across the border that ‘prevented the flow of commodities’ between the two places.53 In Kwangtung, the CCP pursued business supervision and deflationary policies after the civil war. Local merchants who preferred a free hand and an inflationary tendency in prices resented both policies.54 The suppression of retail business and the flat lining of rents after 1949 meant that thousands of merchants in the province next door to Hong Kong were unemployed and unable to find new businesses. For many such merchants, as one report put it, the only alternative was to ‘seek state employment, go to farms or emigrate’.55 Under the KMT, few taxes were paid. But the business scene was awash with bribery and corruption among the great families to secure influence and opportunity. After 1949, communist ‘expropriation’ was bitterly resented by Southern China merchants because trade profits were low.56 There was a note of gloominess about the merchants. For instance, they believed that foreign trade, especially with Hong Kong, would be completely extinguished by the CCP. Private merchants would be cast from business. Therefore, Hong Kong was thought to be headed for decline as private traders would no longer go there and it would only benefit when the CCP wanted to buy or sell.57 Much of this pessimism was due to the ban on free trading in tungsten, antimony, and tin because they were essential war materials in the Korean conflict but it was not helped by a restraint placed on the trade in gold and silver either.58

Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong  161 Although the CCP forbade certain exports through Hong Kong, and cornered scrap metal and tobacco markets in the colony, it was buying up big for the Korean War. This made for many opportunities for vendors of construction materials, clothing, refrigerators, rope, foodstuffs, and medical supplies. They sold to the CCP through its proxies of non-Chinese nationality due to the sensitivities of the Americans. These were observed by the British who, nevertheless, remained adamant that Hong Kong's free trade status would be maintained.59 The CCP also saw Hong Kong as a vital hub for foreign exchange. This propelled its financial markets. These cash reserves sloshed around most of Hong Kong’s banks. Their shareholder registries were often in large part made up of sojourning mainland merchant Chinese. The nervous dominance of landlords and the uphill battle of the merchants in variable times had a bearing on KMT political thinking. Mouthing about the ongoing ascent to democracy remained important. But the party members were only really concerned to stitch up the housing market and inch toward bigger and more successful businesses gloriously free of a government intent on funding public improvements or redistributing wealth through the tax system. The romantic legacy of the May 4th Movement in vernacular education and government in the name of liberal individualism lightly clothed the Kuomintang as it came to assert national government in 1927. But it was met by an increasingly oppositional politics from the CCP after 1945, which made much better use of the May 4th principles. The power of the Kiangsi experiment of the CCP was kept in check by the predominance of the landlords – the class that remained a stalwart for the KMT in the countryside. When one’s party is infused by the values of landlords – who think it natural that they are owed money because they own something – all other political priorities follow in that wake like a pitiful kite tail. Thanks to their KMT political operatives, the names of landlords found their way on to special lists that adjusted their taxable income so that the more they raked in, the less they had proportionally to pay (if they paid anything at all). One of the masterpieces of socialist realism was a motion picture about a KMT landlord, Crows and Sparrows.60 The film followed the fate of a group of tenants in a house who were evicted at short notice in the socalled ‘suppressing chaos’ era by their KMT landlord, Hou Yibo, who was a military officer who decided to sell the house quickly as the communist army approached Shanghai in 1949. As the screenwriter framed the introduction of the film: the lackeys of the thuggish Chiang Kai-shek clique, in their death throes, intensify their oppression of the people even as they make preparations to scatter like chickens and flee like running dogs…61 After the communists arrive in the city, the house was predictably restored to the tenants. The film's theme of the corrupt and unethical property

162  Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong class resolves happily for the anguished occupants. Hou fled with his mistress and his firm’s money to Hong Kong after having contemplated an earlier flight to Taiwan. He had been instructed by his boss in Nanking to join the retreat in Canton. Hou had no higher loyalty than that to himself. The film was not as dogmatic as its introduction suggested. Many fascinating side references occurred throughout it. One concerned a tenant, a teacher, Hua Jiezhi. He identified himself as a ‘non-partisan liberal’.62 The other tenants wanted him to confront Hou for moving expenses to quit the apartment block that were payable to them under Shanghai law. Hua felt uncomfortable, as an educated man, in taking the lead on this issue or arguing it out with Hou although he was certain Hou’s time of reckoning could not be far away. Although regarding Hou as a ‘traitor, a profiteer, a petty bureaucrat and a thug’63 he was eventually persuaded that it was good for his young wife to take the initiative to see their landlord. She procured a promise to let them stay. Meanwhile, Teacher Hua was carried off to jail for signing a protest petition at school received by a new principal (KMT spy) who informed on him. Mrs Hua asked Hou to save her husband. Hou will only do so for sex. The story aligned the communism of the approaching army with a lower-middle-class faith in urban subsistence, vocation and moral uprightness. In a scene at the end of the film, as Hou’s car prepares to leave for the airfield, he harangued Old Kong, who had been duped out of the ownership of the apartment property back in the day by Hou. Old Kong was also the father of a communist son put in prison. He told Old Kong that he would be back. He would settle up the accounts with every last one of the tenants. Old Kong calls his bluff and tells him that if he were stupid enough to return he would have to answer to the authorities. Teacher Hua was released from prison for want of evidence against him after being beaten half to death. He returns to his wife and child. No longer the non-aligned liberal, in his brief closing soliloquy, he speaks of suffering a lot but learning valuable lessons. Old Kong put up a welcoming couplet at the entrance of his recovered apartment block about the New Year's firecrackers driving out the old. Teacher Hua chimed in about having to adopt a new way of thinking and that in the Old Society ‘we’ve picked up a lot of bad habits that we will have to fix’.64 As the tenants turned to go back inside to their banquet together he said ‘we will have to learn to be our new selves’.65 Perhaps on some occasions, such selfreform was warranted and did occur. But the measured opportunities were not as abundant as the impression given by Teacher Hua. The communist culture of anti-foreignism, denouncements, struggle sessions, re-education, and rectification soon hit full stride. No special defence was accorded to the quietly spoken schoolteachers of the world who had, reed-like, bent with the stream, and at least had ostensibly welcomed the New China.

Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong  163 Mr Hou was a fleeing landlord who refused to relinquish his claim to primacy in the Old Society even when the writing was on the wall. That he had somewhere to land where he could be cushioned by someone else's money cannot be regarded as merely fictive. Many such men, as Thaxton pointed out, were in the final days of the Old Society 'hiding in the cities' and, when the Central Army of the KMT began to flee south to below the Yellow River, it was the wives and female relatives of the citybased landlords who faced the music at the hands of the peasants seeking a fairer system in the villages.66 The fleeing landlord depicted in Crows and Sparrows was a worthy stereotype of the dubious mainland money that landed in Hong Kong in the last years of the 1940s. In a sense, the ones who fled to Hong Kong with some wealth were the lucky ones. As Chang Fei-hsiung poignantly contended from the mainland in 1951: The propertied class … has not only lost faith but have realised their hopeless position. At present, they are standing between the positions of ‘regret’ and ‘will to recover’.67 Unchecked landlordism first made Shanghai and then Hong Kong. Members of the colonial communities were as intent on rent seeking as the locals. But as a way of deriving a living, and its coupling with bourgeois nationalism, landlordism served a narrower and narrower section of interests and calcified into monopolism, as time went by. So much so that the world became comprised only of competing renters. The portrayal of Hong Kong protesters in the international media as the resurgent progeny of Free China does them no good at all. Their rent-seeking ideals are the same as those of their forebears. This is why their political agenda is obstinacy and heated reaction over a single issue. It never conflates into a critique of Hong Kong's corporate commandeered politics or its debilitation of everyday life in the territory. Billionaire property tycoons were not shoulder-to-shoulder with protesters in Mong Kok, LegCo, or PolyU. They would not risk their ruin in support of such fitful mouthing of democratic politics. Yet, the cash-engorged grandees are only half the problem. Many of the protesting students cannot rely on even a small amount of inter-generational wealth coming their way. They insist on toughing it out in Hong Kong, and the luckier ones treat themselves to mini-breaks in Vancouver, Taiwan, or Japan once a year, in a nihilistic satisfaction that 'no option' is everyone's option. It is as if they are blind to the fact that not everyone is in the same boat or that the dream of landlordism will never become real, no matter how good their mastery of maths or time management. Those who dominated the economic hierarchy of rural China began to skate on thin ice in the early 1930s. They were absentee landlords who owned land that a hired steward managed on-site while they made

164  Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong diversified investments in manufacturing industries. Before the civil war and throughout it, the KMT did the bidding in national government for the landlords. The KMT then tightened control of the mainland villages via paid proxies throughout the early 1930s with its gendarmerie. It sent in the labour contractors who pinched the women and children from the countryside for its factories in the cities. The personal connection between rural tenant and landowner had diminished, and with it, the prestige of the landlord class. 68 The real point of difference between the bourgeois New Culture radicals and the protocommunists was over support for landlordism and the entire social and political structure it ordered. The Hong Kong protesters see landlordism as part of the fabric of the way they live, as did their forebears. Local government is the enemy. The police are the enemy. The CCP is the enemy. As children of history, the protesters are beset by the same suspicions as their great grandparents were and, although locked out of the revenues of landlordism, cannot renounce it while there is the slightest chance of finding a slice of it, without also tearing down a whole constellation of associated certainties even though they only point to their finitude. Protesters compound their plight by not reading up on the freedom claims of the New Culture movement. It was a movement of ‘conscious protest’ against traditional culture.69 That's exactly what landlordism has become. It's at the root of most of the troubles in Hong Kong. One business article from the years immediately before the Handover noted 'the greed of Hong Kong landlords is fast becoming legendary. To say their actions are disgusting to the business community would be an understatement'.70 The reporter in this article had to be recorded as 'anonymous'. Fear was held for personal reprisal for publishing tenant experiences. Of course, many of Hong Kong's student protesters live in a public flat with their parents and grandparents at heavily subsidised or no rent. The private rental market has not run in parallel with the public system and, if the children, someday, want to leave home, they have to become successful enough in a very crowded job market to enter the private rental or purchase market. For most, there is no spotless kitchen broadcasting over ample parkland just as there is no such thing as infant formula with ingredients that make your kids smart. Whether you have faith in these things or not, there is only guilt that you are not doing everything you can do to attain them. Landlordism, rent seeking, once upon a time, could promise easy money days after years of scrimping on the lowest rungs of the ladder. The protesters, although living and working cheaply enough, are not only without a rung but are disinclined to rove to Nanyang too. Maintaining, with a white-knuckle grip, that Hong Kong is a theme park of wondrous convenience, that you cannot take your eyes off without turning into a pillar of salt. At one point, most of them declined to nip down to Kuala Lumpur for a cheap iPhone although, even with the

Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong  165 airfare included, it was cheaper than the same model in Hong Kong. In Cantonese slang, something that is 'inconvenient' is expressed as 'a friend from Macau'. What does worshipping property get the young of Hong Kong? The idea of 'conscious protest' is to be unafraid of publically identifying and fighting those conditions of life that are not what they claim to be or must for the sin of their dysfunction be cast aside for another idea. Hong Kong aims to survive until the mid-Autumn festival because fighting is a waste of energy. Go to a Fairway restaurant early in the morning and see the old bus drivers retired at 52, order pandan leaf wrapped glutinous rice wonders nowhere to be seen on the menu. Life centres on a way to find what you like, it is a demand for something that should be known, but is not, and delivered as something every day. It is a politics of allowance, meagre but special, routine but no less counted on, easily upset deeply by minor interferences. The ethics of the KMT making money from rent or filling factories with child labourers have long been forgotten as the moral contests of the age. By exempting the landlords from critique in social and political policy, the KMT advanced an idea of modernity that its heartiest supporters were untouched by. These days, the youth of Hong Kong sleep on the lounge after midnight when their grandparents have gone to bed in the second bedroom. The Cantonese are famously private about their home life and seldom invite outsiders into their home. They take little pride in the conditions of their home life. But there can be no critique of the cost of residential property without the risk of public self-alienation. Having tossed and turned on the lounge all night the youth of Hong Kong wake to the real nightmare: high levels of tertiary education to prepare them for jobs that do not exist. They face the highest private rents in the world and no prospect of their own public flat without a lengthy waiting list stint. No separate apartment means they delay getting married and having children. They live in perpetual adolescence in which education brings no reward or a marginally better life, as they have been told. No prospect of moving forward. The disappointed KMT families, the Old People of these young protesters, not the CCP, created and profited from the landlordism that now makes their lives impossible. The KMT, not the CCP, insisted on the policy culture of putting non-inclusive monopolist corporate interests ahead of the polity and beyond the concern of government and law. It is abnormal that Hong Kong has not had extradition arrangements with China, Taiwan, or Macau. What resulted from reform suggestions was a fevered conspiracy that the CCP sought to control Hong Kong dissidents with extradition on political charges rather than empower Hong Kong to detain and transfer criminals wanted for crimes in other parts of China. The Red and Green Pangs (crime families) of Shanghai that had acted hand-in-hand with Chiang's liquidation of trade unionists, communists,

166  Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong and left-leaners in Shanghai in 1927 flooded into Hong Kong in the early 1950s. They did so primarily through association with social welfare and charity associations that the British had to let in. It is little wonder that extradition from Hong Kong for criminal activity strikes such a raw nerve among their antecedents. If you can blend crime and charity into a single life, crime and seditious anti-communism look like an easy fit. The Kuomintang refugees who limped then poured into Hong Kong in the years 1949 to 1953 espoused the values of landlord China and saw nothing wrong in ordering Hong Kong with such ideas under the greedy supervision of the British. Their great-grandchildren now conduct street battles with police and vandalism sprees on university campuses in wildly alternating bouts of isolationist protest and nihilism evidenced by making a train station, a street, or bus shelter useless. If our house is being confiscated, no one shall have it! If our lives are stuck in an endless loop, so is Hong Kong! We can smash up an MTR station and next time we swing around the Kwun Tong Line it will be repaired! The Hong Kong protesters have lost the battle with their great grandparents over the trickle-down glory of landlordism. But they refuse to admit it, so now they fight for a continuance of isolationism in which things that should change do not for no reason other than a misplaced belief that things are done differently in Hong Kong. The protesters possess a Rightist idea of democracy that assumes corporate monopolism and interference always prevails over democratic consultation or decision. This is the characteristic that makes them ordinarily content to follow the money, even if it is to no personal avail except a few cents in the dollar or a bridge to nowhere kills a pod of rare river dolphins. Only when interference is thought to be inspired by a communist plot does rhetoric about separatist democracy go into overdrive. It is a different ballgame when proposed changes in sedition or extradition law make their isolationist and fugitive agendas a matter of criminal accountability. This makes them extremely sensitive to being under-consulted. In the rush of the international media to offer exoneration and accolades to the so-called freedom movement of Hong Kong, no one, including the protesters, can see events as history itself frames them, or a world less conditioned by international media sees them. If they could, they would not fail to see their fits and jerks as symptoms of a suppressed and conceited Chinese nationalism devoid of its own nation. The political expressions of the KMT's gangland heritage sound these days in violent and destructive but easily crushed outbreaks in highly confined spaces. Becoming harder and more violent in a place of no consolation is an expression of having nowhere but the street and the barricaded campus to go. These children of the runners, the lieutenants, and their bosses, want to be left alone to their business as if any attention they attract is not their fault. They see their places of refuge after 1949

Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong  167 as inviolable, anti-communist strongholds. The more they flail in protest in Hong Kong, the more it becomes apparent that they are prisons. The CCP does not pursue the property gains of landlords in Hong Kong, or landlords themselves. It is glorious to be rich these days anywhere in China! What it will not tolerate from the new generation of landlord dreamers is libertarian or separatist rhetoric or challenges to public order. The metaphor of the CCP 'narrowing down' Hong Kong's freedoms distracts from the territory's broad KMT-esque acceptance of corporate distortion of democratic mandate in housing, infrastructure decisionmaking, and unaccountable professional constituencies. Corporatism and representation rigging are part and parcel of the democracy model accepted by protesters in Hong Kong. Seeking the isolated colonial status quo, they dress it in 'freedom talk' and 'opportunity talk' but blindness to the historical loss of certainty of the KMT makes the contrived seem genuine to protesters. The supposed radicalism of their demands superficially covers over the inherited invalidity of the judgements they are based on. As things stand, they can neither be acted on as if valid nor be set aside for historically viable demands. Not adopting some sense of history leads the protest movement to a state of intoxicated nihilism that spurts out in habituated ‘watery’ or Occupy protests or the mock standoff of a siege in which no-one dies because Hong Kong 2019 was not the Paris commune of 1871. Committing property damage felt like something had been changed, evidence that something was felt seriously. Then the cleanup crew arrived. It was erased. Life went on in 2020 as if there had been no chaos. When asked what caused chaos, mystic and humourist Chuangtse replied that all people ‘strive to grasp what they do not know while none strive to grasp what they already know’.71 This ambition for knowledge, and overlooking of knowledge, disturbs the equilibrium to make people push at barriers, and not always the right ones. What Hong Kong people want to know, what cares will help them advance, and help in their unconcealments, remains to be seen. If one conceives Hong Kong, with its obsession for the monetary value of one square foot of apartment space, as an ever-shrinking box slowly squashing its human occupants, what to care about takes no great striving to know, or to appreciate with fresh eyes.

Notes 1 Heidegger, Being and Truth, 10. 2 BBC News, ‘Hong Kong Protesters Demonstrate Against Extradition Bill’. 3 Jackson, ‘Protesting the Identity of Hong Kong’, 3. 4 Xu, ‘When Fury Overcomes Fear’. 5 Xu, ‘When Fury Overcomes Fear’. 6 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 68. 7 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 68. 8 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 68.

168  Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong 9 Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment, 6. 10 Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment, 7. 11 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600400173-5: ‘China’s Future’, 2. 12 Coco, ‘German Imperialism in China’, 156. 13 Montgomery and Rondinelli, Great Policies, 43. 14 Hu, ‘The Chinese Renaissance’, 53. 15 Hu, ‘The Chinese Renaissance’, 53. 16 Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment, 329. 17 Montgomery and Rondinelli, Great Policies, 43. 18 Chan, ‘Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement’, 572. 19 CIA-RDP82-00457R002100350002-2: ‘Illicit Opium Traffic’, [4]. 20 Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader, 116. 21 Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader, 117. 22 Nietzsche, A Nietzsche Reader, 117. 23 Xie ‘The Eternal ‘May 4th Movement’,168. 24 Heidegger, Being and Time, 183. 25 Wu, ‘Overseas Chinese’, 416. 26 Wu, ‘Overseas Chinese’, 416. 27 Wu, ‘Overseas Chinese’, Table 17. 2, 416. 28 Wu, ‘Overseas Chinese’, Table 17. 2, 416. 29 Fitzgerald, The Third China, 85. 30 Fitzgerald, The Third China, 86. 31 Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 27. 32 Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 28. 33 Schurmann and Schell, ‘The Revolution Goes Inland’, 196. 34 Schurmann and Schell, ‘The Revolution Goes Inland’, 196. 35 Jean Chesneux, Peasant Revolts in China, 83. 36 Chen, The Present Agrarian Problem in China, 18–19. 37 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600350468-4: ‘Administration Council Issues Regulations’, 2. 38 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600350468-4: ‘Administration Council Issues Regulations’, 2. 39 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600350468-4: ‘Administration Council Issues Regulations’, 2. 40 CIA-RDP80-00809A000700010324-9: ‘Reports Reveal Serious Defects in Land Reform’, 4. 41 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600370871-4: ‘Reports Opposition Land Reform’, 1. 42 CIA-RDP80-00809A000700010324-9: ‘Reports Reveal Serious Defects’, 1. 43 CIA-RDP80-00809A000700010324-9: ‘Reports Reveal Serious Defects’, 2. 44 CIA-RDP82-00457R007500070008-1: ‘Population Transfers from Kiangsi’, 1. 45 CIA-RDP80-00810A001800470003-8: ‘Tungsten Mines of Kiangsi’, [5]. 46 Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, 126. 47 CIA-RDP82-00457R004300480008-8: ‘Chinese Communist Demands, [2]. 48 CIA-RDP82-00457R004300480008-8: ‘Chinese Communist Demands’, [2]. 49 CIA-RDP82-00457R004300480008-8: ‘Chinese Communist Demands’, [2]. 50 CIA-RDP82-00457R004300480008-8: ‘Chinese Communist Demands’, [2]. 51 CIA-RDP82-00457R004300480008-8: ‘Chinese Communist Demands’, [3]. 52 CIA-RDP82-00457R004300480008-8: ‘Chinese Communist Demands’, [3]. 53 CIA-RDP82-00457R002800640002-3: ‘Communist Guerrilla and Nationalist Troops’, [4]. 54 CIA-RDP82-00457R005400550005-1: ‘Merchant Dissatisfaction, [2]. 55 CIA-RDP82-00457R005400550005-1: ‘Merchant Dissatisfaction’, [2]. 56 CIA-RDP82-00457R005400550005-1: ‘Merchant Dissatisfaction’, [4].

Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong  169 7 CIA-RDP82-00457R005400550005-1: ‘Merchant Dissatisfaction’, [7]. 5 58 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600340042-7: ‘Canton Arranges for Fuel’, 1. 59 Price, Resistance in Colonial and Communist China, 1–19. 60 Latham, Pop Culture China, 164. 61 ‘Crows and Sparrows’ (1949), 2:15 to 2:35. 62 ‘Crows and Sparrows’, 21:40. 63 ‘Crows and Sparrows’, 34:35 64 ‘Crows and Sparrows’, 1:45:32. 65 ‘Crows and Sparrows’, 1:45:45. 66 Thaxton, Salt of the Earth, 289. 67 CIA-RDP80-00809A000600400173-5: ‘China’s Future’, 3. 68 Bianco, Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 106. 69 Hu Shiu, 53. 70 Anon., ‘Hong Kong Landlords: Boomtown Rats’, Business Asia, 1. 71 Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of China, 126.

Bibliography Bianco, Lucien. Origins of the Chinese Revolution, 1915-1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967). Chan, Johannes. (2014) ‘Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement,’ The Round Table 103(6): 571-580. Chen, H.S. The Present Agrarian Problem in China (Shanghai: Canton Christian College, 1933). Chesneux, Jean. Peasant Revolts in China 1840-1949 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973). Fitzgerald, C.P. The Third China (Melbourne: FW Cheshire, 1965). Heidegger. Being and Truth trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). Heidegger. Being and Time trans Joan Stambaugh (New York: SUNY Press, 1996). Hu, Shih, ‘The Chinese Renaissance,’ in Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (eds), Republican China: China Readings 2 (London: Penguin, 1967). Jackson, Liz (2019) (Editorial) ‘“Protesting the Identity of Hong Kong: The Burdened Virtues of Contemporary Pretty” Nationalism,’ Educational Philosophy and Theory 51(4): 157-162. Latham, Kevin. Pop Culture China: Media Arts and Lifestyle (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007). Lin Yutang (ed) The Wisdom of China (London: Four Square, 1963). Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1973). Nietzsche. A Nietzsche Reader trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1977). Orazio Coco (2019) ‘German Imperialism in China: The Leasehold of Kiaochow Bay (1897-1914),’ Chinese Historical Review 26(2):156-174 Montgomery, John and Rondinelli, Dennis. (eds), Great Policies: Strategic Innovations in Asia and the Pacific Basin (Westport: Praeger, 1995). Price, Rohan. Resistance in Colonial and Communist China: Anatomy of a Riot (New York: Routledge, 2019). Schurmann, Franz and Schell, Orville. ‘The Revolution Goes Inland,’ in Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell (eds), Republican China: Nationalism, War and the Rise of Communism China (London: Penguin, 1967)

170  Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May 4th Movement (Berkley: University of California Press, 1986). Thaxton, Ralph. Salt of the Earth: the Political Origins of the Peasant Protest and Communist Revolution of China(Berkley: University of California Press, 1997). Wolf, Eric. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1971). Wrathall, Mark. Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth Language and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Wu, Chun-Hsi. ‘Overseas Chinese,’ in Yuan-li Wu (ed), China: A Handbook (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973). Xie, Dikun. (2017) ‘The Eternal “May 4th Movement”: Between Enlightenment and Tradition,’ Social Sciences in China 38(2): 165-174.

Archival Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Digital Reading Room CIA-RDP82-00457R002100350002-2: ‘Illicit Opium Traffic South East Asia’ (13 December 1948). CIA-RDP82-00457R002800640002-3: ‘1. Communist Guerrilla and Nationalist Troops Between Canton and Kowloon 2. Communist Guerrilla Activities in Kwangtung’ (9 June 1949). CIA-RDP82-00457R004300480008-8: ‘Chinese Communist Demands on Ho Chi-p’ing in Hong Kong’ (10 February 1950). CIA-RDP82-00457R005400550005-1: ‘Merchant Dissatisfaction with the Communist Regime, Kwangtung’ (4 August 1950). CIA-RDP80-00809A000600340042-7: ‘Canton Arranges for Fuel, Forbids Free Market in Strategic Metals’ (24 August 1950). CIA-RDP80-00809A000600350468-4: ‘Administration Council Issues Regulations Governing Classification of Peasants’ (17 October 1950). CIA-RDP80-00809A000600370871-4: ‘Reports Opposition Land Reform’ (10 February 1951). CIA-RDP82-00457R007500070008-1: ‘Population Transfers from Kiangsi’ (7 May 1951). CIA-RDP80-00809A000600400173-5: ‘China’s Future and a Third Force’ (3 July 1951). CIA-RDP80-00809A000700010324-9: ‘Reports Reveal Serious Defects in Land Reform Cadre Leadership’ (24 September 1951). CIA-RDP80-00810A001800470003-8: ‘Tungsten Mines of Kiangsi and Kwangtung’ (26 August 1953). CIA-RDP80-00809A000600400173-5: ‘China’s Future and a Third Force’ (3 July 1951), 3.

Online sources BBC News,‘Hong Kong Protesters Demonstrate Against Extradition Bill' (Published: 6 June 2019) Avail: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-48572130 (Accessed: October 24 2020).

Landlordism and Democracy in Modern Hong Kong  171 Xu, Zhangrun, ‘When Fury Overcomes Fear’ (Published: 10 February 2020) Avail: https://www.chinafile.com/reporting-opinion/viewpoint/viral-alarm-when-furyovercomes-fear (Accessed: 5 March 2020).

Motion Picture References Motion picture, ‘Crows and Sparrows’ (1949) Directed by Zheng Junli (Published on: 28 March 2020) Avail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8pI8geoefU (Accessed: 6 April 2020) 2:15 to 2:35.

Other Anonymous, (1994) ‘Hong Kong Landlords: Boomtown Rats,’ Business Asia 26(8):1.

14 Closings

Viewed in late colonial lights, Heideggerian certainty of representation appears as a sullen pride about doing nothing more than prevailing by force. In a statue raising or a revolt put down, it was at sharp odds with the humanism thought encoded in Western civilization at home but seldom seen abroad. In the years since Heidegger’s death in 1976, colonialism studies have entered a phase of deep revision characterised by guilt, denunciation, reparation, and the decolonisation of thought and language. Certainty and constancy of the Heideggerian shade used to hold the line out in the colonies, where it was usual for whites to insist that they knew what was best and right. Certainty girded the acts of an empire. The old certainties struggle to maintain a stable representation of colonialism these days. The Heidegger glimpsed in The End of Philosophy no longer commanded the same excitement as he did in 1927 when he was the freshly minted impresario of Dasein. Reclined to take in the horizon of Being, he sought meagre comfort, not torpor. One last time, the old Rhinelander found a resting location for his clear, beady eyes to register the heavenly orbiters zipping over high above. He reached toward the heavens when gravity felt it’s its heaviest. They filled an inky backcloth to the rules he knew, and umpiring indifferently, held the existential and metaphysical in a close tension of odd description for one last time. By acknowledging an act of representing that cannot recognise its doubt but can be the product of it, Heidegger opened up to history a valuable line of inquiry. Was he a herald of history? In The End of Philosophy, the immediate foreground rushes away low, and Heidegger's skyward periphery tips open to a constellation of elements, some old and cold to the eye, some new and enticing, blinking in the middle distance. Although written as a culmination, the later released work must be taken on faith and put to use. In its argument, history becomes a product of colonial uncertainty. The world has shrivelled down governance theory and its echoes in philosophy. Once-subservient formulations based on equal rights via an appeal to shared humanity have blossomed even if they have stalled in

Closings  173 a mode of perfume and attraction. The reinforcement of colonialism by stale projections of doubtless certainty or the inevitability of conquest, have not only been challenged by profane heckling from the manifesto set. Our epoch has been called the Asian Century. National destiny-Dasein was mimicked by most of the former Southeast Asian colonies. These economies are net exporters of petroleum, palm oil, or sapphires, and turning the tables on colonialism, do not desire to import the Western world in sufficient quantity to develop a reciprocal fitness in response only to it. Certainty and constancy are on the rise in all sorts of unexpected places but the reasons for it are nothing that Heidegger would recognise. He would only waffle on about Western certainty coming from confrontation with the ideas of foreigners. What happens when we meld Heidegger's conception of doubt causing representation and Nietzsche's contention for invalid judgements having the same effect as valid ones, by being treated as if legitimate? Arguably, a fresh way of viewing colonialism emerges. The acts that legalised racism by excluding or segregating by race do not these days demand decolonisation of thought or speech. Scorning or calling out invalidity does not put an end to it. How can the invalidity of statues and statutes alike be viewed? Why not see them as real and effective in their own time? Instead of finger waving, we give a symptomatic reading of history. We do not proclaim ‘they’ should have known better or that an old outrage demands re-education in the countryside for the impenitent length and breadth of the Humanities or the ones of its number you think don't care enough. Instead, we should read history for nervousness, overcompensation, acts of ceremony or mercy designed only for generating cheap admiration, and, especially, any principles that were sacred at home but ignored abroad. These were the telltale signs that a colonial Dasein scene at an individual, institutional, or national level was imbalanced – made crooked on purpose, lied about, and misrecorded. Then, nobody talked about it outside of the colony. The effectiveness of mistruth gives critique new questions to ask and new histories to write. No one conquers another race to tell the truth about how or why it occurred. As readers of history this motivates us to write about it alive to crookedness, coldly amused about it, now and in the investigation of the past. What platform emerges from the retrospective correction of colonial history? A new set of conveniences, a new hero, the same old lack of rigour when it matters? Lop-sided Dasein is a great teacher. Allowing an evil colonial enactment to stand, or reconfigure itself later, is the price of this education, which, of course, is easy to say if the inter-generational discomfort is not yours. When Heidegger wrote about the ‘uncanniness’ of the ‘the correctness of the untrue which remains concealed’1 one could see the influence of Nietzsche on him. Attune to an imbalanced Dasein scene, and appreciate how one's thrownness affects the quality and duration of striving to find reciprocity in intent in the world. Calling the world out, or putting it

174 Closings to rights, is only meaningful striving if you have chosen the best and most historically sensible cares. Democracy, freedom, the rule of law, etc, have become the concealed correctness of the untrue for much of Hong Kong. The rule of law must be close to unconcealment by now. The chapter on the Maria Hertogh riots considered Heidegger's contention that when Christianity fell out of politics, it could nevertheless be triumphant as a culture. When Christianity is amorphous, rather than central and ritual, it becomes harder to critique yet more relevant than ever as a bearer of projected certainty. One cannot help but think of Nietzsche's will to power in this context. Perhaps the Hertogh episode was less about the opaque power of Christianity than ‘the deification of…cunning’. 2 We saw in the final chapters that the CIA and the Special Branch in the 1960s did not flinch a millimetre in its assessment of threat or necessary action. They also indulged their enemy with psychological profiling, as well as thoughtful and creative readings on their motives and tactics. There was a cynical reading of how and why spreading certain kinds of misinformation would disrupt enemy networks. Try reading a few Stratfor emails these days on wikileaks.com. It becomes clear that certainty has since become encamped, and relying on shorthand, fosters a belief that too much knowledge will only complicate necessary resolve. Getting into an enemy’s head might be unnecessary if you are simply targeting bad guys whom the media agrees with you about. Curiosity about the enemy has become interspersed with idle talk instead, a kind of situational bad-guy whispering. The Christian certainty used to be a downplayed but distinctive belief in prevalence. The coloniser dared to take a tour around the mind of a communist, or knew that weakening their institutional arrangements could provide another way to skin the cat. Nowadays, third party intelligence contractors do the listening in. Buoyed by an immediate presumption of an enemy requiring interdiction, the loss of circumspection – rationed doubt, if you will – has cheapened the process of winning the day. There is still much hunting. That’s relentless now, as is the e-stalking. There is next to no curiosity about the interiority of the enemy. That is the result of a shallow inference of national certainty replacing its deeply felt Christian ancestor. Reflexive action against the action-takers is the norm. Certainty from possessing rapid response units, armour, and datacrunching laptops rules the day now in neo-colonial states, and the global informational pushback when any unexpected digression occurs in international waters. Gone is the ceaseless winnowing of those given colonial agency in search of reliable grains passing for Christian determinacy. I.e. being one of the boys does not matter anymore. Nor does cat skinning have to be artful or screened by little, carefully positioned political ambiguities or counter-intelligence operations.

Closings  175 Among Nietzsche’s arsenal of ideas, the will to power has long been dominating and enthralling victims with ‘obey and tremble’ or ‘shock and awe’ wherever its theatre of wet dreams plays. Intimately connected with the glorification of punishment and the enslavement of peoples across the earth, its central idea was that by tormenting the colonised you discovered their relative strength – how much respect, if any, to give them. The will to power also had redemptive uses in seeing the colonial world as it was. What happened when tested in a version of colonialism with tripartite dimensions, such as Singapore/Malaysia in the 1960s? It shined in its explanation. A nativist party could not get its way entirely and had to wait for a weary nod from a foreign party that had abandoned the field but still held the final say because of a handful of frigates. It was the best example of psychological domination. Or put another way, it was the modus of weakening by helping. In the tripartite world centring on Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in the 1960s, we also saw communist Superhumans making a break for their idealism only to be shackled by an eternal return of indeterminate detention and pleas for their repentance coming from snakes of men. The broken soul of Orwell’s Winston Smith was usually in prospect for the communists of Singapore. Nietzsche’s idea of the moralisation of guilt was also found to be potentially useful in colonial studies. Lee Kuan Yew established a mediocre political standard of reasonableness and cast the communists outside of it. Lee demonstrated that guilt for communism, mystically owed not to him or God but to the humidity of isolationist Singapore, could prevail as an enfolding shame that eventually permitted freedom to inmates but prevented their participation in future politics. Lee acted to curtail the cares of communists, to sideline their Dasein scene, and to beckon them towards his own endlessly reasonable version of existential validity as if it was not riddled by uncertainty. Like Lim Chin Siong, Lim Hock Siew was a standout at holding out. He continued to campaign against the ISA after being freed to practice medicine in Singapore. He treated his least wealthy patients for no fee and gave them their bus fare home. His internal compass worked fine. The concept of truth changes within works and over time in Heidegger’s writings. In 1927, care leading to unconcealment causes the truth to be known. By 1946, truth could take on the flavour of objective correctness. It stands above governments and its pursuit in a spirit of constancy is the salvation of an individual. We are not to make forays with truth, for there exists a truth that is ‘valid in all judgements, behaviour, and life’.3 Truth is either something normatively invoked and operative, or something remote and useless to officialdom. That is the insight from combining Nietzsche and Heidegger on the colonial turf. The exclusionary use and effect of 'certainty' in the colonial world was all too prevalent but seldom written about in other than impliedly chauvinistic

176 Closings terms – that genre is well represented in British Empire history today although suffering a sharp decline in support among most intellectuals since the 1990s. The sense of certainty in the home nations was frayed and confused by guilt-based immigration programs from the colonial nations to the metropole after the Second World War. Certain kinds of history became impossible to write regardless of the certainty they were said to demonstrate. It turned out that one Heideggerian idea of certainty, as something true in all cases, was nothing more than a fairy tale stuck on repeat. The intermediacy of Heidegger’s Dasein concept made it dependent only on possessing humanity. From that precondition, it is taken as read that you care about being yourself, that an algorithm of existential validity wends its way back and forth from you to the outside world if you care for its chiropractic adjustments. The reciprocal interrogation of fitness or aptitude never ceases. The case of Mr Lou and his sentence review brought home this point. Individuals who care about ‘things’ to achieve their unconcealment can find solace in truth. Sudden vindications occur when nothing too much seems at stake. It takes energy to challenge parking fines but the process develops balanced Dasein. At 73 years of age (in 2019) Mr Lou kept putting up his handwritten slogans in protest on the Mon Kok police station until the police came and tore them down and he started plastering them up there again. The Japanese when in Hong Kong gave early lessons about living up to representations by name; that to act outside a naming convention and throw doubt on the possession of your prize, but rule martially in the spirit of conquest and subjugation, are not ideal portents for colonial success. Nevertheless, their repression of Hong Kong and Canton produced darkened Superhumans among the many gently waving chrysanthemums. These people, such as Mrs Kwok, could be suspiciously absent at the fall of Hong Kong but buy and sell, and travel, freely about the consolidated territories. The normal rules did not apply to them. These Superhumans always make their down payments ahead of time. They know the rainy day is coming. The possession of truth comes not from knowing many weighty facts. It is the choice made in favour of care for this or that. The potential bounty of unconcealment can come no other way. Truth in this sense is situational and thus subjective in that it pertains to one’s choices to achieve unconcealment. Kierkegaard’s influence on Heidegger’s idea of internal validity is evident in this. Subjective truth can be found by ‘committing to an ethical-religious way of life and to the living of that life’.4 That sounds like homework or sobriety. It also sounds like a mediated truth between what is officially recognised and what is remote to officialdom. It is a process of piecing together according to a Christian morality that Nietzsche would regard as a waste of a life. Care in the way that Heidegger wrote about it was very much like the silence demanded when lottery numbers were broadcast into homes

Closings  177 after the news on a Thursday night. The silence was needed to comprehend and to adjudicate relevance. Working out how much there is to care about, if anything, absorbs much of our lives. In the colonial village, care was typically about subsistence – for example, the health of a crop of corn, or filling a belly to go down into the mines, or what the symptoms of a child's sickness demanded of the family budget. There was a fundamental quality to do with cares in colonial life. The same can be said of the unconcealments that such cares provoked. In the post-colonial world, that is, the Western world still draining revenue from its old colonial digs, care is less to do with survival, and more to do with an irritating sense that a higher fate alludes us. In the irritation for silence, as the lotto numbers are called, most attempt to find space for comprehension for things that are, in the vein of a lottery, speculative. These range from keeping receipts for a tax deduction in the vague sense you are owed something to tertiary studies in marine biology in the belief a cool job is ripe for the taking. Pursuing the righteousness of social justice concerns without giving anything up, or fighting for freedom rather than having a habitable home, are other speculations that misread history and the cares that it orders. The central role of landlordism in Hong Kong protest appears like an unconcealment bottled up and prevented from passing into truth. It does not help matters that in Hong Kong, self-pity enters the mouthpiece of the phone and is heard as dissent at the other end of the line. Western care takes the lottery at its claim and plays it. It is a belief in the surface that individuals play by and get played by. We are up to our ears in education and hyperactive agency, so everyone plays in a solemn belief in 1% chances and demands silence as the numbers fall. As people wait in tension, seeming eclipses being. Appearing ready for success is far more important than working on your compass. The play occurs on a platform of comfort drawn from the developing world. The West has held this nascent for hundreds of years. 'Constancy' and 'truth', as ideas projected on to colonial history, necessarily become warped. Their purity can no longer be guaranteed by the final word of conquest or white racial isolationism. The BLM marches are only the beginning. They will not stop finding fresh reasons. The KMT's fall from grace after the civil war resulted from a blinding presumption to rule as the national government of China. The military loss led to the unconcealment of inner invalidity that, as an organisation, and individuals inside an organisation, could not be accepted in their refuges of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaya. The fade of the KMT showed how much hoping against reality is ingrained in us all. It showed that a fierce non-conformity is demanded by authenticity. It is easier to retire on your opium stash and invent five different words for homesickness. In places where East is famed to meet West, care as speculative chancetaking must also hazard the inflection of Western priorities, their misinterpretation, or over-simplification when brought into spaces where they

178 Closings have to be made to fit. No one in such spaces can believe that capitalism could have taken a wrong turn, or actively denies life – at least not to you and yours. That sounds like a denial I have heard somewhere before. Refuting inauthenticity is about turning the perceived injustice of losing into a way of life. This prevents any recalibration of cares. In the locales of East-meets-West, the openness of the lottery to being played offers reinforcement to every care pursued. Every common care has the sheen of authentic endorsement from the media but individuals cannot complain if what seems is not what is. Care in the colonial world could be manipulated by manufactured scarcity. Care in the post-colonial world, and the reason people said ‘shoosh!’ when the numbers were called, arose from there suddenly being so many things to care about. These days a comparison service, a cheat, a shortcut, ‘a tasker’ or a simplification is sought. We trust our providers as though no one would use the opportunity to sell us on something we do not need or that we miss nothing by avoiding duty. No one will ever seriously ask you to make a reckoning of your aims in history and eligibility for sympathy. These days, what the representation seems like cannot be doubted. Finding what it is seems like hard work.

Notes 1 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 100. 2 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 109. 3 Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, 96. 4 Julia Watkin, The A to Z of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy, 259.

Bibliography Heidegger. The End of Philosophy trans. Joan Stambaugh (London: Souvenir Press, 1973). Julia, Watkin. The A to Z of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010). Nietzsche. The Will to Power (New York: Dover, 2019).

Index

Authenticity, concept of 3, 24, 28, 49, 50, 56–58, 69, 78 Barisan Socialis (BS) 141–144 Benson, Lee 14 Brabazon, Honor 42, 55 Chan Yong Tsing 116 Chang Fei-hsiung 83–85 Chiang Kai-shek 16, 83, 86, 88, 91, 111, 115, 154, 161; propertied class, and 83, 84, 155, 163 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): on Lim Chin Siong 122; on Lee Kuan Yew 127, 131; on National Democratic Reconstruction Association 112–113; report on Southern China (1965) 51 Collingwood, R.G. 5, 6, 8 Care, concept of 17, 23, 81, 104–105, 107, 121, 151, 152, 177, 174 passim Chia Thye Poh 124 Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 86, 89, 90, 111–116, 152, 156; and quadrilateral beings/landlords 158–159; and treatment of KMT 90 Concealment/unconcealment, concepts of 6, 36, 67, 73, 81 passim Crows and Sparrows (motion picture) 161–163 Dasein 3–7, 10, 16, 22–24, 42–43, 55–58; and colonialism 29, 30, 33, 56–57; description 10; historicalspiritual-national 34–36, 172; and Hong Kong collaborators 70–72; Japanese occupation, and 67–71; and reciprocity 2; and striving 3, 5, 11, 13, 22–24, 41, 69, 71, 82, 174 passim

Eternal return of the same 11, 12, 17, 22, 121, 136, 137, 175 passim Existentialism 28, 29; and facticity 3–4; and Sartre J.P. 26, 28–30; open vs atheist 29 Gimson, Franklin (Governor) 88 Grantham, Alexander (Governor) 86, 89 Gurney, Henry, Sir 87 Heidegger: and confrontation 1, 173 passim; on constancy/certainty 2, 5, 7–9, 14, 25–28, 30, 34, 44, 48–49, 54, 58, 63–64, 82, 85, 127, 172; End of Philosophy 25, 28, 172; and idle talk 6, 45–47, 49, 122, 174; and representation/doubt 2, 3, 9, 13, 14, 25, 27, 29, 34, 36, 45, 47, 49, 50, 82, 86; on technology/ technicity 3, 21, 57, 58; on truth 2, 4, 5, 14, 21, 22, 24, 42, 67, 83, 105, 107, 151, 154, 175, 176 passim Head, Antony (Lord) 129, 130, 137, 138, 139, 143, 144 Hertogh, Maria 96–97 Hertogh Riots (1950) 95–101; Christian culture, and 99, 101, 107; Commission of Inquiry 104–109; sensitivities, about 95; victims 106 Hofstadter, Albert 2, 7, 11, 22, 41, 42, 56, 67, 71; on reciprocal fitness 11, 56, 173, 176 Hong Kong (Colonial): British rule (1945–1948), under 82–92; and the KMT 82–85; Japanese rule (1942–1945), under 54–64; collaborators 72–75; coercion

180 Index tactics 76–77; naming conventions 60–63; sovereignty issues 58–60 Hong Kong protests (2014) 15, 17, 41–47 passim; and approved salvation 42, 51 Hong Kong protests (2019) 1, 51, 149–152, 167 passim Ho Peow 126, 144 Hung Shi 78 Hunter Boyle, John 13 Indonesian confrontation (Confrontasi) 127, 129, 141 passim Jeremy Irons supposition, the 55, 56, 59, 68, 81 Judiciary talk 15, 42–48; definition 42; and doubt 50 Knox, Rawle 117 Kuomintang (KMT) 6–17, 46, 49, 54, 64 passim; in British Malaya 30, 113–118; corruption, of 85, 91, 115, 160; in Hong Kong 83–89 Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee (KMTRC) 111, 112 Landlords 16, 72, 74, 75, 76, 84–86, 112, 159 passim; stereotype, fleeing 112, 163 Landlordism 17, 149–167 passim Land reform (China) 84, 156, 158, 159 passim Lee Kuan Yew 17, 108, 121, 122, 124–125, 127–130 passim; and communists 121, 131–132 Lee Tai Chiu 86 Leung Kwok Heung case 46–47 Lim Hock Siew 144, 145, 175 Livett, George (Deputy Comm’r Police) 97, 99 Lou Tit Man case 41–45 Lu Shu Shiang 124 Mao Tse-tung 111, 112, 156, 158 passim May 4th movement 153, 157, 161 Morris, Nigel (CID) 99–100, 105, 107 Nationalism, Malayan 35–38 New Culture movement 150, 152– 153, 155–157, 164 passim

Nietzsche: on conquest 1, 2, 6–7, 23, 27, 36, 98, 176; on morality 14, 22, 43, 97, 176 passim; on patriotism 37; on truth 2, 6, 8, 9, 11, 27; and validity/invalidity 8, 9, 25, 29, 49, 50, 105, 114; on will to power 5, 7, 9, 11, 21–24, 49, 58, 86, 99, 104 passim; definition 26, 97–98, 125; Singapore and 123–126 Nihilism 12, 46 passim; Hong Kong protests, and 149, 166, 167; KMT and 118; Nietzsche on 126; Singapore, use of in 127–128 Occupation 1–2, 7, 10, 22 People’s Action Party (PAP) 122–132; will to power, and 123, 125, 126, 132 Prophet Mohammed Birthday riot (1964) 108, 128 Racism 2–3, 5, 9, 173; and Nietzsche on species-preserving 9 Rahman, Abdul (Tunku) 124, 130, 131, 139, 142, 143 Said, Zahari 144 Superhumanity 9, 16, 17, 21, 72, 73, 121, 122, 136–137, 145, 175 Tan Kok Chor 115 Tan Jin Quee 144 Tam Yam Seng 144 Thrownness 3–5, 173; and colonialism 29, 62, 81–82 Toh Chin Chye (Deputy PM) 128, 130, 136 Wang Jing-wei 13 Wilson, Harold (PM) 139 Wiltshire, R.C.B. (Acting Comm’r Police) 104–106, 114 Wong Wing 77 Wong Kwong 77 Young, Mark (Governor) 86