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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not have been possible without the award of a research scholarship from the Australian National University from September 1975 to September 1978, for which I am most thankful. I wish also to express my appreciation to the University’s Department of Pacific and Southeast Asian History for sponsoring my fieldwork from March 1976 to April 1977. I am very grateful to Dr Anthony J.S. Reid and Dr David Marr for their wonderful assistance and support as supervisors of my doctoral thesis. Both were always accommodating and read successive drafts with infinite patience. Prof. Wang Gungwu, Director of the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, from 1976 to 1980, and later head of its Department of Far Eastern History, gave much encouragement and support during my research. I have been greatly encouraged to revise and publish my thesis by the valuable comments and suggestions I have received from a number of people, including Prof. John Smail (Wisconsin University ), Prof. K.J. Ratnam (Universiti Sains Malaysia), Michael Leigh (University of Sydney), and Anthony Short (Aberdeen University), all of whom read the thesis after it was completed. For their helpful criticism and comments on the drafts, I thank Alfred W. McCoy, Hank Nelson, and Mitsuo Nakamura, though I was not always able to take their good advice. My other academic colleagues — Khoo Kay Kim, Stephen Leong, Akira Oki, Robert Reece, Anton Lucas, Soeyatno, John Funston, and Louis Siegel — helped me in many ways, both personal and professional. Dr Siegel especially helped to locate several Chinese source materials regarding the MCP and “Overseas Chinese” associations in Singapore. To my A.N.U. colleague Wang Tai Peng I owe a special debt. His knowledge of “Overseas Chinese” history in Borneo and Malaya and his help in discussing and translating some difficult Chinese-language documents, pertaining to the MCP and the “Overseas Chinese”, helped me gain valuable insights on the position of Chinese in Malaya during the Japanese occupation and in the postwar period. xvii I am also deeply appreciative towards my many informants and interviewees in Britain, Japan, Malaysia, and Australia, for their unfailing kindness and cooperation in providing me with whatever information they had. Since these persons are numerous and cannot all be named, I wish simply to give special thanks to Datuk (Dr) Awang Hassan, who was the Malaysian High Commissioner to Australia during 1976–8 when I was at the A.N.U., and to John Davis, the former chief of Force 136 in Malaya. The libraries of the Australian National University, the Universities of Malaya and Singapore, the London School of Oriental and African Studies, Rhodes House, Oxford, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, the National Library of Australia, and the National Library of Singapore gave me facilities and assistance which contributed significantly to the accomplishment of my research. Thanks are also due to the staff of the National Archives, Kuala Lumpur, and the Public Record Office, London, and to Soong Mun Wai and Encik Ibrahim of the University of Malaya Library for their interest and help. The Visual Aids Section printed the photographs and Keith Mitchell of the Cartographic Laboratory, Research School of Pacific Studies, A.N.U., made the maps. Dr Voon Phin Keong of the Department of Geography, University of Malaya, and Soong Mun Wai provided me with information on the mukim of Batu Pahat and Muar, without which the maps for these areas could not have been done. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Mrs. Jean Marshall, wife of the late Mr. David Marshall, former chief minister of Singapore, for showing me a three-page letter written to her by John Davis (dated 17 March 1997) responding to points raised by former Force 136 member Tan Chong Tee, who went with Davis on his second entry to Malaya in July 1943, as given in Tan Chong Tee’s book, Force 136: Story of a World War II Resistance Fighter (Singapore: Asiapac Books, 1995).* xviii | Acknowledgements * Chong Tee was captured by the Japanese and suffered one and a half years of imprisonment. He was bitter towards Davis and his fellow agents. Davis pointed out he was not Lim Bo Seng’s deputy, and described his account as being full of “insinuations and innuendoes”. Chong Tee, unlike Bo Seng, was not a “key man” in Force 136, said Davis, but he showed “great courage” in the work they did in the open “behind the enemy lines”. Chong...

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