The tough former communist guerrilla who led a bloody but failed insurgency against British rule in Malaysia in the late 1940s and early 1950s died Monday in Bangkok after decades in exile. He was 88.
Chin Peng, whose real name was Ong Boon Hua - he adopted a pseudonym for his political work - was the last of a breed of Asian anti-colonialist figures that included Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, Indonesia's Sukarno, Myanmar's Aung San and Cambodia's King Norodom Sihanouk, who died last year. Chin Peng's dubious distinction was that unlike the others, he didn't win his struggle.
"I suppose I am the last of the region's old revolutionary leaders," Chin Peng wrote in his 2003 memoir "My Side of History." "It was my choice to lead from the shadows, away from the limelight."
Chin Peng also lost a legal battle in recent years to be allowed back into Malaysia, and the country's prime minister was quoted Monday as saying that even in death his return would be barred.
Government leaders said his return would upset many Malaysians who lost loved ones during the communist insurgency.
Chin Peng gained public attention during World War II, when he and other guerrillas provided the bulk of resistance to the Japanese occupation after Allied troops were swept from the Malayan peninsula and Singapore. He was a courageous, behind-enemy-lines fighter, learning guerrilla tactics from his British then-comrades-at-arms in the jungles, and was even awarded the high honor of the Order of the British Empire - which was later rescinded.
He also became a committed communist. The ethnic Chinese were an underprivileged class in British-ruled Malaya, and for a number of young people among them, communism represented social justice and a shortcut to power and status.
In 1948, the Communist Party of Malaya decided to wage armed struggle. Leading a 10,000-strong force, Chin Peng faced 70,000 British, Australian, New Zealand, Fijian, Gurkha and other British Commonwealth troops in the jungles between 1948 and 1957.
The war, known as the Emergency, took the lives of an estimated 10,000 fighters and civilians and stamped out communism from Malaysia. Chin Peng contended the British were at least as brutal. Tens of thousands of often innocent Chinese were uprooted.
Chin Peng continued to fight the Malaysian government even after independence in 1957. But with the dragnet closing in, he fled to China in 1960. From there, he went to southern Thailand to reunite with hundreds of fighters loyal to him.
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