THE LOT OF the labour immigrant is seldom a happy one, today or a century ago. For many of those who travelled from China and India to work in the tin mines or rubber estates in British Malaya, life was far from easy in the period between the two world wars.

To be sure, the whole peninsula underwent tremendous changes in political, economic, demographic and ethnic dimensions during those years. The tin industry that had brought so many to Malaya's shores with its promises of wealth experienced its share of booms and busts, as did the rubber industry. As a whole, the urban population in Malaya grew from 22.7 per cent before the First World War to 35.1 per cent after the Second. This made it the most urbanized place in Asia outside of Japan.

ORGANIZING LABOUR

While British interest in the Malay Peninsula had been strategic in the beginning, by the twentieth century, use of land for rubber production and the mining of tin had become their major economic concerns. These industries formed the basis of the colonial Malayan economy, governed by an administrative system created to provide it with stability and profit. Where labour was concerned, adjustability to shifts in demand as well as sustained low and stable wages were key considerations for the authorities as well as the employers.

In July 1959, just before elections took place, it was announced by the respected New York publication Pick's Currency Year that Malaya was Asia's wealthiest nation. That conclusion was drawn based on “circulation of currency per head of population”. Coming at 24th spot after 23 western countries, Malaya was classed as “moderately wealthy”, just a nose ahead of Hong Kong, and far ahead of Japan, Siam and Ceylon. While such a ranking may not say very much about the socioeconomic situation experienced by the population at large, it does commend Malaya's new government for carrying out a smooth transition in the finances of the country.

Much credit should be given to its finance minister for the achievement. In fact, for this and other contributions to the new nation, Hau-Shik was granted the KBE (Knight Commander of the British Empire) in 1957, for which he was entitled to use “Sir” before his name, and then at the second anniversary of Merdeka, in 1959, just before he left politics, he was awarded the SMN (Sri Maharaja Mangku Negara), which carried the title of “Tun”. Indeed, one could say that the conferment of the latter title signalled the end of his career as a politician, a career he was drawn into more by circumstances than by choice.

The ranking by Pick's also suggests that Malaya was in a healthy enough economic state as it entered the turbulent 1960s, although the election results of 1959 did show that there was much unrest and that the Alliance did not stand on as solid foundations as might have been assumed by the British.

But then, despite the political rhetoric, the founding of Malaya should not be seen as an endgame, neither for the retreating colonialist nor for the leaders of the new nation. The problem of Singapore and the northern Borneo territories still had to be solved, and any solution would require the Federation of Malaya to function as a pillar for it.

THESE WERE tumultuous times, and the World War that was now ended ushered into being a world that none could recognize. Not only did individuals have to adapt to new situations, the political map of eastern Asia was about to change dramatically, and new security alliances were emerging that would include actors whose birth, one could say, was fanned by the fires of war. Conditions in Malaya changed as much with events happening in the region and the world as they were by domestic dynamics. The age of nation states had arrived in Asia.

As Josef Silverstein noted, the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia had a profound impact on all affected by it. No doubt, conditions were very different in different countries, but despite that, with some “modification and reformulation” here and there, some general propositions can be made on the matter:

European colonialism in the region had in fact been dealt a death blow by the Japanese invasion. But what would take its place was far from certain. Amid the chaos of surrender, the badly weakened European powers tried their utmost to regain their former territories in Southeast Asia.

IN THE CHAOS of the times, the future of East Asia was apparently being fought over between its two political giants, China and Japan. To what extent the colonialists could return in triumph to regain their stature and power was a grave matter for consideration, especially for the peoples they had ruled. For most, nationalism was as yet just an interesting but impractical thought rather than an ideological conviction.

For Malayan Chinese, two stances were prominent and possible at this time. Does the post-war future for them lie with China, or with the European colonialists, damaged though their reputation and their right to rule had been by the Japanese? Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was not acceptable to them, and the idea of small nation states growing out of the disparate colonies was for most as yet a fantastical myth.

Surviving this period of global conflict and planning loosely for the time of fragile peace that must surely follow occupied the minds of displaced persons such as Hau-Shik. The active and influential person that he was, Hau-Shik's sentiments at this time was more clearly China-oriented, and it was towards Chungking that his thoughts initially went. There was no clear reason why the Japanese would not continue their expansion into India, and therefore inland China seemed at this point a safe place to be.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek happened to be in Calcutta on the final leg of his visit to India when the Malayan evacuees arrived. Serendipitously, the two men met for the first time.

A short note hastily typed on 27 April 1942 by Hau-Shik to a friend he called Martin, apparently someone he played golf with in Kuala Lumpur, provides some scant details on the crossing from Singapore to Calcutta. “Martin” was Major J.M. Bell, whom he learned had successfully escaped via the Riau Islands and Sumatra to Bombay, and who was now based in Colombo.

Appendix

This book is first of all written for Malaysians so that they may know themselves and their past more profoundly. It is a story about one of the country's founding fathers. Not only did Lee Hau-Shik help found many important institutions, foremost of which was the Malayan Chinese Association, his is the only non- Malay signature on the Declaration of Independence signed in February 1956 in London. If one further considers the fact that he was not even born in Malaya, a supremely race-conscious country, then one has to be curious about who this remarkable person was, and what the times he lived in actually were like.

This Chinese community leader who ignited Malaya's hugely successful independence movement that we remember as the Alliance; this owner of tin mines on whose head the invading Japanese army put a high price; this civilian who became a colonel in both the British army and the Chinese army; this stern person of extremely short physique who, when he withdrew from politics at the age of 58, carried the title of “Sir” and of “Tun”, the latter the highest honorific one can attain in Malaya; this migrant who became Minister of Finance and to whom much credit for the founding of the Central Bank of Malaya is given—how is one not to be curious about this man, about his life and times and how this capitalist came to play such a central role in the anti-colonial movement?

Colonel Henry Lee Hau-Shik and Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman were the two people Tunku Abdul Rahman chose to sit on the colonial Executive Council in 1953 to project the interests of the emerging nation of Malaya. It is my hope that this biography of Hau-Shik, read together with my earlier book on Ismail, The Reluctant Politician (2006), will provide future generations of Malaysians with an easy yet steady grasp of how their country came into being, and encourage a deeper understanding about the expediencies of the age.

IN ITS ATTEMPT to create the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan deemed itself to be following the dictates of imperial economics. Tokyo's modernization was a defensive one, occurring in the wake of China's defeat in the Opium Wars. What it seemed to have learned from the process was how important a secure supply of resources was to industry. Its success in transforming its culture into one that could vie with Western powers was all the more extraordinary when compared to the failure experienced by other non-western polities of the time, especially the ailing Manchu dynasty that was ruling China.

The fall of the Qing in 1911 failed to place China onto any clear path of modernization, and the possibility of the empire being divided among properly modernized nations was all the stronger when the Versailles Treaty of 1919 saw German possessions in China being handed over by the victorious allies to Japan—which was then one of their numbers—instead of being returned to Chinese control. To be sure, no central government existed in China then. It was only after the Kuomintang under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek succeeded in defeating and co-opting the various warlords with his Northern Expedition in 1926–28 that such an authority came into being.

Chiang managed to complete this feat through violent campaigns that destroyed the urban presence of the Chinese Communist Party in 1927. This achievement did not stop the Japanese from invading Manchuria in 1931. In fact, it may have prompted them to act sooner rather than later.

HAU-SHIK had returned to Malaya without his family, and was living at 12–14 Sultan Street in Kuala Lumpur when he wrote to his wife on 26 November 1945:

Incidentally, Hau-Shik's departure from India was saddened by a breakdown of relations between his family and that of his brother Hau Mo. The two families had by then been staying together in India for three years. On 13 December, he wrote to his children, telling them that he had moved back to 16 Golf View Road at the beginning of the month, and had employed two maid servants to prepare the house for their return even though he did not know when that would be. He was also arranging for their schooling: “I have got all the beds for you but there is no mosquito net, no mattress, no bed sheets and no pillows so you had better bring these things back yourselves.”

It was indeed a new Malaya they were all returning to. In fact, they were entering a new world into which much adaptation was needed. Hau-Shik was positioned to play an essential part in this new world, not least in the founding of a new troubled but optimistic country. Tan Cheng Lock, whose reputation after a lifetime spent in business and public administration was already an extremely impressive one, would soon take on an even more prominent role in history. Cheng Lock returned to Malaya only in June 1946.

Seldom does one get a chance to write a biography of a historically important personality based on that person's own private papers. Exactly such an opportunity was given to me in 2005 when the Tun Dr Ismail Abdul Rahman papers were offered for safekeeping at ISEAS Library. Over the following few years, three books came out of that heap of papers.

Another such chance was offered to me again a few years later when the family of Lee Hau-Shik—the first finance minister of the Federation of Malaya, one of the founders of the Malayan Chinese Association, and also one of the persons responsible for the highly successful innovation of fielding a coalition of race-based parties back in 1952 in Kuala Lumpur—decided after years of hesitation to also place the man's private papers at ISEAS Library.

While the Ismail papers came in five or six plastic bags, the Lee Hau-Shik papers arrived in over 50 full boxes. Having too few sources hampers a researcher, no doubt, but having too much can be an even greater problem. The documents and pictures reflected the many periods of Hau-Shik's life, but often, they merely provided bits of information stretched over time, multilayered the ways life is played out for each of us, in essence.

However, since the main threads of Hau-Shik's life are known, conjuring a narrative out of the material was in itself not all that difficult. But in order to inject the right historical significance into his story, and to tell a tale that holds lessons for the present time and retains the attention of the modern reader, I decided that it was necessary to contextualize his life into objective periods. After all, the history of Southeast Asia in the first half of the twentieth century was such a tumultous one, and if important dynamics were not highlighted, then the details of his life would lose potency and appear interesting only to those personally involved in some fashion.

What we end up with here, then, is a unique kind of biography. In effect, I must admit that I am opportunistically using the life of Lee Hau-Shik as a telescopic lens through which larger stories can be told within which his private one is played out in—here passively or as a supporting actor perhaps, but there definitely as the lead making up his own lines as he went along.

THE PRECEDING chapter presented with some alacrity what conditions were like for migrant workers who took the risk of moving to the Malayan Peninsula from China and from British India. In many ways, British Malaya was a pioneer territory for them. Originally run for strategic and logistical reasons to facilitate the global trading ambitions of the East India Company, Malaya under the British soon became the supplier of two of the world's most important products in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth.

Working the tin mines or the rubber estates were the major draw for migrant workers. Both these commodities were essential to the early industrial world. Where the capitalists were concerned, competition was between Europeans and Asian upper classes whose business sense encouraged them to look to the region and to its emerging economic trends.

Tin and rubber were still infant industries, and ownership conditions, technological innovations, and market control were hotly contested matters. The world was changing fervently, and the colonizing of East Asia in effect drew its peoples to participate in the globalizing economics of the times. They were not passive bystanders in their own history.

Polities were changing as well. Empires had fallen, or were falling, and new powers had appeared in their stead on the world stage. Germany was on the rise in the heart of Europe, just as Japan was doing at the eastern edge of Asia. The triumph of the United States of America in the First World War had given the world notice that it was an unstoppable future global power, while the October 1917 Revolution in Moscow was altering the foundations of political thought and conflict.