This book tells the story of the Hakka Chinese in Sarawak, Malaysia, who were targeted as communists or communist sympathizers because of their Chinese ethnicity the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of these rural Hakkas were relocated into “new villages” surrounded by barbed wire or detained at correction centres, where incarcerated people were understood to be “sacrificial gifts” to the war on communism and to the rule of Malaysia’s judicial-administrative regime. The Hakkas of Sarawak looks at how these incarcerated people struggled for survival and dealt with their defeat over the course of a generation. Using methodologies of narrative theory and exchange theory, Kee Howe Yong provides a powerful account of the ongoing legacies of Cold War oppression and its impact on the lives of people who were victimized by these policies.

In 1941, perturbed by the worldwide advance of war, the Chief Secretary, senior executive of the Sarawak government in Kuching, Malaysia collated a dozen strategically important files under the title, ‘Payments to certain Brunei Pengirans, or their descendants’. He shipped these to a trusted colleague in Limbang, at the farthest extremity of Sarawak territory. A few months later, Japanese forces invaded. The Chief Secretary’s action preserved these files, and in 2008 they were rediscovered, still intact and suffering only from the effects of exposure to the tropical environment. Transcribed, together with associated documents, this book explains why these files confirmed the century-long rule of the three “white Rajahs”, of Sarawak ― James, Charles and Vyner Brooke ― and describes the relationships of these Rajahs with their subjects and with neighbouring States, notably the sovereign power, Brunei Darussalam, and the British colonies of the Straits Settlements.