BOOKS OF THE DAY
Malaya and Burma
The Chinese in Malaya. By Victor Purcell. Issued under the joint auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Institute of Pacific Relations. (Oxford University Press. 18s.) MR. PURCELL'S book fills a gap in the now well-documented history of Malaya. His pages may be statistical, but they are enlivened by historical and contemporary anecdotes as Mr. Furnivall's pages are enlivened by the antics of a paladin tilting at the warehouses of our Commonwealth. Mr. Purcell illuminates his statistics with a fifth- century vignette of Fa-Hsien in tears at seeing a Chinese fan in a foreign land, with a sketch of a Singapore miser Tan Che Chang cutting off a little finger to remind himself to gamble no more, with pictures of Chinese committing gang robbery to collect funds for China's revolution or firing off crackers at Ramadan and Christ- mas not to neglect any god able to assist their money-making. Equally interesting are glimpses of fundamental differences between the Chinese and European outlook. While, for example, Raffles, the founder of Singapore, took merchants to form the highest and most respectable class among the Chinese, they themselves in his day placed the scholar first, the farmer second, the artisan third, the merchant fourth and the soldier last. The British in Malaya, ignorant of Chinese ways, even appointed rival leaders of turbulent and criminal secret societies to be members of Perak's first State Council!
It was tardy realisation of this ignorance that led the Malayan Government to create a Chinese department, of which Mr. Purcell was later a distinguished member. And while his knowledge has admirably qualified him to write this history, official contacts have inclined him to condone the Chinese pretension that Malaya is a province of China. One would hardly grasp from his pages, as Whitehall lately has been compelled to grasp, that Malaya is the country of the people after whom it is named. Mr. Purcell's allusions to the Malays are few, and his endeavour to remove the impression that the Chinese are " unassimilable, destroying Malaya's racial unity," is achieved only by ignoring the existence, circumstances and aspirations of the people of the country. There is hardly a hint that wherever they settle in the Far East the industrious Chinese are the locusts of commerce and industry, leaving for local races nothing but manual labour and invading even peasant agriculture if a crop like pineapples happens to attract their hungry notice.
Mr. Furnivall's vision of what he calls a " plural economy " is very different. For if as an administrator Mr. Purcell has become intoxic- ated with the march of Chinese industry under the British flag, Mr. Furnivall is a theorist who like the slave at a Roman triumph croaks or rather crows of the imperfections and transience of our colonial system. Absorbed in his theme, unconsciously he twists evidence to his purpose. " Formerly," he writes, " the natives of British
Malayt cultivated little but rice," a dictum involving a suggestio falsi because formerly they cultivated very little of anything and generally imported rice, which under British protection they grow for themselves. Take another sentence. " In Malaya it was the loss sustained by government and the planter through the neglect of subsistence crops that stimulated activity in promoting cultivation" of rice and other foodstuffs. A more open mind would discover in that activity an element of regard for Asian welfare, particularly as the Malays (the only rice-growers) have never produced food enough to contribute to the diet of the alien plantation coolie. To say that " the introduction- of new crops has not enriched but im- poverished native life " is an utter travesty of the facts. And if the Oriental is more heavily in debt than he ever was, it is evidence that he has more capital, better credit and a higher standard of material comfort. Among other comforts many Orientals now count the ministrations of western medicine, which Mr. Furnivall dismisses as a mere instrument of capitalist exploitation. Moreover, in Malaya at any rate, so far from " private charity biaring most of the cost of social services," all but a fraction of the expenditure on education and medicine has long been defrayed by government ; and even if the Rockefeller Foundation did finance a campaign against hookworm and endow two chairs at Singapore Medical College, it is not only colonial dependencies that have availed themselves of this American benefaction.
But nothing is right for Mr. Furnivall. Aeroplanes appear to him- primarily vehicles for the conveyance of gold and diamonds to Europe. And he wrongly thinks that on retirement colonial officials. . are allowed to become at once directors of companies operating in the country of their service. Even the cessation of anarchy and tribal wars over a large part of the globe only excites him to lament that "under foreign rule political and military traditions degenerate." Obscene tortures and the murder of a slave-girl to provide a sacrifice at the building of a new house, these, though of recent date, make no impression on Mr. Furnivall. " Under native conditions, untouched by modern commerce . . . slavery was in general merely a form of domestic or agricultural service that, under the conditions then obtaining, best provided for the welfare of the labourer" I That is a conclusion based on a comment of a modern author on Nigeria, and it is typical of Mr. Furnivall's habit of arguing from the particular to the general. For with all his interest in the Asiatic and the African, it has suited his case to turn a blind eye to much of their past history.
After this implacable diagnosis of our colonial system comes a quite mild prescription for the future. Ignoring international forces like Islam and Christianity and Communism, Mr. Furnivall pro- claims nationalism as a new faith for colonial people. Yet he cannot get away from internationalism, and citing Tamil schools for Tamil children as " detrirnenta116 social welfare " in Malaya, he talks airily of fusing races disparate in every respect " in order to create a common social will," or in plain language to induce the lion to lie down with the lamb. Mr.- Purcell coquets with the same ideal, but knows far too much to imagine with Mr. Furnivall that the Malays and Chinese might combine to elect an Asian president to represent
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