The formative years of Malaysian politics: the MCA and the Alliance, 1950-1954

CHARLES E. SHUMAKER

The formative years of Malaysian politics: the MCA and the Alliance, 1950-1954

Bloomington IN: Xlibris Corporation, 2010

242 pp. ISBN 978-1-4500-2623-9, hb $29.99, ISBN 978-1-4500-2622-2, pb $19.99, ISBN 978-1-4500-2624-6, eb $9.99

Reviewed by A.J. Stockwell

Royal Holloway, University of London

The author of this book, the late Dr Charles Shumaker, served as a Chinese interpreter for the US Navy during the Second World War.  Between 1948 and 1959 he was employed as a teacher in Southeast Asia by the Methodist Board of Missions.  He was principal of the Anglo-Chinese School in Malacca from 1949 to 1954 when he was transferred to Medan, Sumatra. He later joined the US State Department and held posts in Jordan, Taiwan, and Dar-es-Salaam. During his time in Malacca Shumaker got to know Tan Cheng Lock, a leading baba businessman and the founder-president of the Malayan Chinese Association.  This friendship, we are told, ‘blossomed to the point where they regularly discussed all the pertinent political points of a nation trying to find its birth among racial problems, the Communist Insurrection, and the disintegration of the British Empire’.  Such was their mutual trust that Tan gave Shumaker ‘the keys to the filing cabinets containing his voluminous personal writings and correspondence’.  This account of the formative years of Malaysian politics is based on Tan’s archive together with contemporary newspapers.

In the 1920s and 1930s Tan Cheng Lock had been a lone voice in the legislative and executive councils of the Straits Settlements advocating a united, self-governing Malaya.  In 1946-48, as the British succumbed to Malay protests and abandoned the Malayan Union, he led the All Malayan Council of Joint Action in a vain attempt to salvage its more liberal provisions, notably the citizenship scheme. In 1949 he founded the Malayan Chinese Association, first as a welfare organization to support Chinese squatters during the Emergency and then reorganized it as a political party to promote Chinese interests in the context of non-communal politics and multi-culturalism.  Temperamentally more philosopher than leader of men, this ‘sage of Malacca’ participated in the futile Communities Liaison Committee and the short-lived Independence of Malaya Party, before joining the United Malays National Organisation in an electoral marriage of convenience which developed into the Alliance of three mutually exclusive parties to which the British would transfer political power in 1957.

This book is something of a work of piety in two respects.  First, it is ‘dedicated to Dato Sir Cheng Lock Tan an architect of Malaysian independence’.  Second, because Shumaker’s children saw it through to publication after his death (though, understandably, not with all the loose ends tied up), it is ‘dedicated to the Shumaker family’.  It is not at first clear to the reader when the bulk of the book was composed. Charles Shumaker’s brief foreword is dated 1982 but one soon senses that he was writing much closer to the events which he was reviewing. One clue is that none of the published work to which he refers is more recent than 1952.  We find him at the end optimistically looking forward to the first federal election of 1955 and a new era of self-government which ‘completely vindicated’ Tan Cheng Lock’s life-long campaign for inter-communal harmony. 

History has moved on and so has its study.  Scholars of the period have long since been able to consult Tan’s personal papers at the Institute of South East Asian Studies, Singapore and also to research much other primary material that was not available to Shumaker. As a result a considerable literature has added to our knowledge of this subject, reshaped our understanding and revised many judgments that were made at the time.  This book is, therefore, very much a period piece. Yet herein lies its value.  Shumaker’s commentary, particularly on controversial developments in national educational policy which particularly impinged on his own work, has an immediacy.  Furthermore, because he benefited from Tan Cheng Lock’s confidences, enjoyed exclusive access to his archive and shared his political principles, Shumaker emerges as his chronicler at a crucial moment in his political career.