ABSTRACT
On 8 January 1950, the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, arrived in the Ceylonese capital of Colombo to attend the first Commonwealth conference ever to be held on Asian soil. The British had asked the Ceylonese government at very short notice to convene the week-long meeting. The official purpose was to discuss foreign policy issues of mutual concern. However, there was one topic that the British were particularly concerned about: the rapid spread of communism in the Far East. For eighteen months now, communist forces had been threatening British interests in eastern Asia. In Malaya - a highly lucrative British possession because of her dollar-earning rubber exports to the United States - groups of communist insurgents were conducting a destructive guerrilla campaign against British plantations and installations. Burma and Indonesia, too, were affected by com munist strife, while in Indochina the French were waging a full scale war against the communist-dominated Viet Minh. Most worrying, from the British point of view, was the fact that China had only recently been 'lost' to the communists, jeopardising British trading interests in the country and threatening to export Chinese-style revolutions to the rest of Asia.
