Test of Strength

In Singapore, bastion of British strength in Southeast Asia, the Communists at last felt strong enough to attack in the open. For months they had worked to infiltrate the local Chinese, who make up 80% of the city's 1,200,000 population. They wormed their way into control of unions, and organized a handy riot squad of 3,000 students (whose schools, say wags, now teach "reading, rioting and 'rithmetic"). To pay their way, they shook down wealthy Chinese merchants, those shrewd barometers of "who's ahead," who have become convinced that Red Peking is the way of the future.

Last week the Communists proclaimed a "general strike." Nominally, the strike was a protest against the arrest of six of their leaders, but its real aim was to embarrass the new leftist government of David Marshall. Chief Minister Marshall, a fast-talking criminal lawyer who greatly admires Nye Bevan, horrified Singapore's starchy Britishers by winning the colony's first election two months ago. His election also aroused the Communists, who resented his stealing their campaign for self-government away from them. Moving into action, the Communist strike organizers halted bus lines, picketed pineapple canneries, granite quarries, rubber godowns, breweries and sago plants. Red goons growled threats at cabbies; the city's taxis disappeared from the streets.

Marshall stood firm, would not release the prisoners, and would not be tempted to violence, although the colony's 4,500 khaki-clad police kept a 24-hour vigil. Across the causeway, on mainland Johore, tough Gurkha troops waited in reserve.

On the strike's third day, the tide began to turn. Despite Communist intimidation, 1,700 taxis appeared again in Singapore's streets. Winning little sympathy at home or abroad, and succeeding in pulling out only 17,000 workers from the city's 120,000-man labor force, the Communists finally ordered the strikers back to work. Lawyer Marshall's government had won its first test case.

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