ABSTRACT
The ideologies of British imperialism and Chinese communism had a profound influence on Malaya during the Cold War, but were challenged and contradicted by the lived experience of at least some of its inhabitants. This is well illustrated in the unpublished memoir, analyzed here for the first time, of Tom Nunan, an Australian tin miner in Malaya from 1950 to 1971. Nunan lived in a time and place of conflicting information regimes. Chinese communism, in this case defined as an organizing belief system, mobilized Chinese insurgents in Malaya against British imperialism starting shortly after the end of World War II. Labeled “The Emergency” of 1948–1960 by the British, this insurgency negatively impacted the mining businesses upon which Nunan depended for his livelihood. The Emergency also hastened the development of Malay nationalism and Malaysia’s independence, which further impacted British and Australian business and social life through Malayanization. As a result, British economic and political power in Malaya shifted in the late 1950s and 1960s to Chinese and Malays, respectively. Chinese communism and Malayanization eroded the prior British imperial or colonial information regime described and lived by Nunan in the early 1950s: “white superiority” in a land of “exotic adventure.” Nunan sought to escape both British and Chinese communist information regimes and hierarchies by nearly “going native.” Nunan’s life and ethnically diverse friendships, including with Malays, Chinese, and Eurasians, countered the ideology of both Chinese communists, who sought to paint British colonialism monolithically as “racist oppression,” and British colonists, who sought to maintain racial and economic hierarchies through policies of exclusion.
