216 { China’s Quest
the CCP was now abandoning its advice, given only a year earlier, to abandon
armed struggle, Chin Peng quickly recovered and asked how much support
Beijing could offer if the CPM again took up arms. Without missing a beat,
Deng offered a stipend of US$100,000 per year.^49 Southeast Asia was under-
going monumental changes and was ripe for armed struggle, Deng told Chin
Peng. The CPM must not, Deng urged, abandon armed struggle at this point.
Chin Peng felt that the reasons for the CPM’s 1959 decision to end armed
struggle were still sound, but he bowed to CCP wishes, and accepted Beijing’s
proposed reorientation of CPM strategy along with the funding. CPM lead-
ers drew up a plan for reviving armed struggle with Chinese support.^50 It is
probable that this abrupt turnaround in CCP advice to the CPM was linked,
in some not-yet-understood fashion, to the “san he, yi shao” controversy pre-
cipitated by Wang Jiaxiang’s February 1962 letter.
With improved financing, the CPM recruited 500 new fighters—mostly
Muslims from the border region with southern Thailand—making a total
of 800 men under arms. Four new bases were set up in jungles along the
Thai-Malaysian border.^51 Further preparations were begun in August 1964 to
set up a CPM-run radio station in southern China. Beijing initially turned
down this request on the grounds that it might intensify US pressure against
North Vietnam, or even China itself. By late 1966, however, the CCP agreed
to establishment of a radio station, with China supplying the site, equipment,
and technical staff, and the CPM providing broadcasting and production
staff. The station, Voice of the Malayan Revolution, went into operation in
November 1969. It was located in an underground bunker in a ravine inside a
heavily restricted military area in a remote area of rural Hunan.^52 It took seven
years to get the new insurgency up and running. On June 1, 1968, the CPM
Central Command issued a declaration launching a new armed struggle. Two
weeks later, CPM forces ambushed Malaysian forces, killing seventeen. The
CPM’s armed struggle continued throughout the 1970s.SingaporeThe majority ethnic Chinese city of Singapore offered a strategically located
target for Chinese revolutionary activism. Lee Kuan Yew was the leader of an
intense struggle against Singapore’s communists in the late 1950s and early
1960s, first as a top leader of the People’s Action Party (PAP) and then as
prime minister of Singapore. Lee recounted the power and attractiveness of
communism to Singapore’s Chinese population in the early 1960s:
It is impossible in ... the 1990s to imagine the psychological grip the
communists had on the Chinese-speaking in the Singapore and Malaya
of the 1950s and 1960s. The communists made these people believe that