218 { China’s Quest
open-front organizations, or both. Weekly intelligence reports from the
Internal Security Department made us ever mindful of their presence
in Singapore and their secret network that linked them to armed groups
in peninsular Malaya.^58
Labor unions and Chinese-language schools were the main organizational
bases of Singapore communists into the mid-1960s. Drawing on these bases,
Singapore’s communists could launch effective strikes and turn out large
and militant demonstrations. According to Singapore’s Internal Security
Department, during the late 1950s and early 1960s that organization’s “Special
Branch” waged “successive operations” to cripple “Communist Party of
Malaya networks” in labor unions and Chinese-language schools.^59 Sweeping
arrests of communists and procommunists during Operation Cold Storage
in February 1962 shattered the CPM underground network in Singapore, ac-
cording to Chin Peng.^60 Many communists and communist sympathizers
were detained and held for long periods without trial.
There is scanty evidence regarding CCP ties to the Singapore communist
movement. When Eu Chooi Yip and Chin Peng met in Beijing in mid-1961
to devise strategy, it is nearly certain that CCP ILP representatives sat in on
those discussions. This, unfortunately, is surmise. Yet the absence of evidence
should not, in this case, be taken as evidence of absence. Given the intensity
of the struggle raging throughout the region, given the important role that
Singapore played and might play in this struggle, and given what we know
about CCP links with communist movements regionwide, it is probable that
such links existed.Indonesia, the PKI, and the United Front with SukarnoIndonesia with its progressive and anti-Western President Sukarno, plus
its large population and powerful communist party, offered fertile soil for
Beijing’s revolutionary drive. Beijing employed two major instruments to-
ward Indonesia in 1963–1965: 1) a united front from above with Indonesian
President Sukarno and leftist elements of the Indonesian military, and 2) “pro-
letarian internationalist” ties with the Indonesian Communist Party, usually
known by its initials in Dutch, PKI. Regarding the united front with Sukarno,
Beijing and Djakarta shared broadly convergent interests in eliminating
Western presence, especially military, from Southeast Asia. Sukarno was a
proud nationalist, strongly anti-Dutch, anti-British, and anti-American, who
saw Indonesia as the rightful preeminent power in Southeast Asia. Sukarno
believed that the Western powers should leave the area and that the ethnically
Malay peoples of Indonesia, Malaya, Borneo, and the Philippines should be
united in a single Malay state, with himself as its leader, of course.